As time hurtles forward, so technology advances. It doesn’t take a genius to forecast that a better iPhone will arrive later this year or that Sony is likely to have mapped out the PlayStation 6 even before it unveiled the PlayStation 5. We all know that laptop manufacturers that bring out models today will have their eye on something better tomorrow. It’s what makes the tech industry so exciting, both to observe and to work in.
But has this always been the case? There appears to be an assumption that consumers in the late 1970s and early 1980s weren’t really aware that manufacturers would improve on the products they released. Take that at face value and you’d be led to believe that people were surprised when Sinclair followed the ZX80 with the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, or that Commodore didn’t stick with the PET and went on to introduce the VIC-20 and C64.
Otherwise, what should we make of the Osborne Effect, which describes the dangers of prematurely announcing a new product for fear of damaging sales of an existing device? It suggests that, in pre-announcing the Osborne Executive and Osborne Vixen when both were far from being in a suitable state for release, potential purchasers of the Osborne 1 computer held off. This caused sales to decline and the company to file for bankruptcy. Yet it sounds too simple a story.
In general, the announcement of a new product back then didn’t tend to harm an existing one. When Commodore announced the C64 in the summer of 1982, for example, people continued to buy the
