Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Because announcing new products before they're available is a good way to kill sales of your old products that are available.
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It's a big enough issue it has its own name; The Osbourne Effect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osbo...20availability.
A case study for the ages.
In some cases it is unavoidable--changing processor families, like Apple switching from x86 to ARM, or evolving API sets, like XBOXes moving from DirectX12 to DirectX12 Ultimate to accomodate hardware ray tracing-- but when it comes to lesser transitions pre-announcements are bad news, to be avoided.
There is, however, a case where companies pre-announce despite not having product nor knowing when they can ship it and that is when the pre-announcement is intended to freeze the market and *prevent* sales, theirs as well as competitors. IBM was a particularly notorious practiioner back in the mainframe era, using pre-announcement of their "next great" to stifle competitor sales. This generally requires a dominant position to pull off. And can invite antitrust action.
Kobo is in no position to do this so they most probably thought they could deliver when they made the announcement.
Inventory management can be tricky during Black Swan events but web pages that lead nowhere are hard to justify. If they don't have the product in the warehouses they shouldn't be listed online.