![]() ![]() The Opera forfeited $1,500 under their contract and donated another $500 to the Tabernacle fund. Camille Seygard took her place as Carmen. A day before the performance, Emma Calve, the leading voice of the Opera and the main reason people purchased tickets, abruptly withdrew from the show, disappointing thousands of Nashvillians who were going to attend. A full stage was built, replacing the small platform, at a cost of $730 and opera-style boxes were installed in the front rows of the gallery. ![]() The board then expanded to 50 and each personally pledged a $200 guarantee to reach the $10,000 number. However, a tabernacle board could only have 5 members under state law so, in anticipation of the show the law was changed to 50 members. The Tabernacle board hoped these performances would retire the $9,000 debt it had acquired. Carmen was one of the biggest and greatest shows planned for the venue, and it required a guarantee of $10,000. They should have dropped the price to gain share and cannibalized their installed base.Octo– In preparation for the upcoming performance of Carmen by The Metropolitan Opera on October 23, 1901, The Tabernacle board met. Xerox had no idea what to do with the device and were afraid it might eat into revenues of their word processors. Why it failed: No marketing and no sales education. Later, Apple Computer grabbed the design for their now-forgotten LISA computer and later (and more famously) for the Macintosh. After prototyping similar designs in its Palo Alto laboratories, Xerox tried marketing it as an office automation device. ![]() The Xerox Alto had a bit-mapped screen, a mouse and a graphical user interface. The world's first production WYSIWYG computer (1981). They should have bootstrapped it by offering it for free for the first year. Why it failed: The idea of interacting with a computer was simply too "odd" for the public at large, and without an audience base there was no reason to advertise on it. The interface was a bit crude by today's standards but, hey, it did pretty much all the Internet-type stuff that we'd want to do today. The Sceptre was about the same price as today's broadband connection ($39.95 a month) but it never seemed to catch on, although it was eventually marketed in a dozen cities. The Sceptre Videotex Terminal was a wireless keyboard-controlled system which delivered news, weather, sports, stock reports, banking, shopping, email, and other information to an ordinary television. The world's first "Internet" access device (1983). They should have offered it assembled, with some function to make it practical (like the RoomBot vacuum cleaner). It was also complicated to program and had no useful built-in functions. Why it failed: It was a kit that required considerable expertise to assemble. And, unlike the Aibo and the SDR-3X, the Hero was fully programmable (it had an on-board PC) and could be customized to your heart's content. Equipped with an articulated gripper arm, an on-board computer and multiple sensors, the Hero could connect to your PC, react to your commands, speak thousands of words, move around, turn its "head," follow a light, and even act as a smoke alarm. The Heathkit Hero Robot was originally released as a build-your-own kit. The world's first mass-produced home robot (1981). Here are three more favorites, each with a brief description of what went wrong and how they might have sold more successfully: Last week, I posted three cool "retro-tech" products that were way ahead of their time, because they illustrate eternal truths about sales and marketing.
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