On your page about CRM history, you said:
“Spare a thought for poor Polaris Packrat, or more importantly, their users. Fantastic Contact Manager in the DOS days, and they even successfully negotiated their way to their first Windows version – no small undertaking. Then they released their networkable version for Windows. Disaster struck! They had to, ala Firestone, recall their products, and disappeared, never to be heard of again. Sad, but true.
Moral of the story – don’t transfer your QA budget to Marketing”
The true moral of the story is “don’t advertise or ship an upgrade before it is ready.”
I was the Direct Marketing Manager at Polaris during this time. I can tell you that the cause of their woes was that the CEO refused to listen to the one person in the company who not only knew that PackRat 5.0 was broken, but was willing to put his job on the line by telling Jack that I was not going to passively stand by while he bullied all of his managers to ship a broken product. After staying on for 18 months to try and help save Polaris, I eventually resigned when, after three months, they stopped paying us “to help save the company.”
During the year before we shipped PackRat 5.0, I was advocating naming the new product (it was a totally re-written product, from the ground, up) “The Ultimate PIM Construction Set,” while continuing sales of PackRat 4.
There is no joy in being able to say, “Jack: I told you so.”