More likely there was some indication but test trials would have been so expensive they wouldn’t recover the cost.
At Intel, we abandoned many designs as analysis said little return on investment.
We had several designs in the works which were trending so badly, we just said “no more”
Excellent application of one of the First Principles of Engineering Economics — “sunk costs don’t matter one bit to your current decision.”
Emotionally, that is very hard to do. “Yes, but I spent SO MUCH already, just a little bit more and I KNOW we’ll be successful.”
The historical product development funnel is always true:
* 1/10 of what goes into fundamental research proceeds to the applied research.
* 1/10 of what goes into applied research proceeds to product development.
* 1/10 of what goes into product development proceeds to market introduction.
* 1/10 of newly introduced products succeed in the market and make big money.
What about Itanium ?
We had an extended support contract with hp and fujitsu and I had to support all that stuff.
I thought we should just buy out all the contracts
. I personally bought more HP ZX series stuff than probably any other single person in the world.
ARRGGG