The problem of abandonment and the value of endurance

When I found out HP was abandoning the hard work of the WebOS team by ditching its associated tablet my heart sank. When I then read on to see that HP was (dimly) lighting a future of consulting and enterprise technology I became infuriated. So many companies seem to quickly swerve with an intial product launch failure without calculating the brand destruction caused by such a brash action.

Abandoning your product is abandoning your brand

When a big brand abandons consumer technology to get into the enterprise space they might as well waved the white flag of surrender. They are basically broadcasting, ‘Yes we don’t get it, so we’ll get into a meta-sales space where we pretend consumers don’t really matter.’ Yes, IBM succeeded by slowly winding down its consumer products and moving fully into the enterprise space, but that was a controlled evolution – not an impulsive U-turn. Besides, copying your soon-to-be direct competitor is about the worst strategy for entry to market.

Quit kidding yourself HP, your problem isn’t the consumer space, your problem is that what you just did: abandoned a major product merely a month after its release – annihilating years of research, development, manufacturing labor and man hours. You just lit a big pile of money on fire in front of the entire technology world, and then acted like it wasn’t a big deal. Now you want to tell my business what we should be doing?

Here’s a lesson: Abandonment is a big deal. When you abandon something quickly, it tells your peers you lack the follow-through and self confidence to value the hard work of thousands of individuals. You broadcast to your customers (yes enterprise and consumer) that you’ll bail the second something looks like it might not work and you lack the initiative and character to fix something.

Endurance is the core of brand strength

It speaks deeply about your corporate culture. It says you believe innovation is cheap, an accident that happens when you throw a few things against the wall. That ideas come out of thin air and don’t require real world success to prove.

Ask any of your engineers, innovation is not cheap and it is certainly not easy. It’s a long evolution of refinement and failure. It’s a test of endurance. You know what would have been a far smarter move? Choosing to endure the initial failure of WebOS in order to realize the possible future tablets in the enterprise space.

Many people seem to praise brands like Apple and BMW for their astounding success in the consumer product space, but they also regularly fail to apply the basic principals of their success.

1) Long term R&D

2) Investment in talent from various skillsets

3) Evolution of simple products over a long period of time, followed by brief revolutionary steps

These things are not difficult to grasp. Make a simple product for a market need, research the hell out of it, and then release it. If it fails, its likely due to a small calibration error rather than a massive misunderstanding of the product. Your research and hard work will prove worth the cycles of iteration and eventually breed success.