Communication
=============


The basic concept of communication in a task can have a huge impact on the eventual success of a project. When looking at failed technologies, a lack of communication between individuals, departments or companies can often be a major contributing factor or the reason that a project failed. Communication is one requirement that is vital for any company to run effectively. A lack of internal or external communication can result in work being missed out, duplicated, or if there is no communication with the customer then the wrong product or technology could even be produced.

In a lot of failed concepts such as the satellite phones, and the CT2 cordless phone the reason for failure has laid in the failure of communication between the possible consumer and the producing company or consortium. The satellite phone is an extremely successful piece of technology technically because it works where other phones such as GSM don’t, however the price for the service has driven it out of the consumer’s affordability However if the company had known how many customers they would attract from the start by speaking to consumers, Motorola would have realised that it would not be economically viable for a commercial service, because consumers wanted cheap calls and service in a small package. The CT2 cordless phone failed as well because consumers wanted to be able to get incoming calls anywhere, and whilst CT2 could not offer this GSM could. If communication had been effective between the consumer research area and the development section, it is likely the CT2 phone would never have existed.

However sometimes it is also the communication between companies which jointly develop something that can be to blame for failure. In the OS2 production Microsoft and IBM did not communicate between each other effectively, and were essentially working towards different goals. It is therefore not surprising that the new operating system never took off as it was meant to. The same can also be said for Acorn and their new RISC PC which never got past the working prototype stage despite lots of market hype. This was a failure because Aleph One never produced the Pentium compatible chip in time so it was not a viable competitor. Again had there been better communication between Acorn and Aleph One then possibly the RISC PC would have taken off because it would have been a viable option at the time.

Essentially if the developer doesn’t know what the consumer wants, or what its partner is doing, then it quite unlikely that a product will succeed in a market place that might already have similar technology competing against it. While it is not always communication that plays the pivotal role in whether a technology fails it is often a large contributory factor, and a company which has a non-effective communication structure cannot expect its technology to survive unless it is large enough to dictate to the consumer that it wants its product (such as Microsoft), or that there are no other comparable technologies.