.Choose a renowned failed project. Ascertain that this is a project failure not the failure of a business. Describe the selected project and analyse the losses incurred by the project. Examine the...

APPLE LISA – Failure Story
Introduction – Apple LISA
Apple developed Lisa in January 1983, Lisa was a desktop computer. It was developed by Apple as a first computer which was a personal computer and had a Graphical User interface (GUI). Apple started to develop Lisa since 1978 and finally launched this product in 1983. The price of Lisa was $ 9,995 which was a very high price as per that time. The product – Lisa had hard drive of 5 megabytes.
The product was named Lisa as a short form to Locally integrated Software Architecture. The product was named Lisa as per the name of Steve Jobs daughter. The product was initially developed to have modern version of computers. Since, it was the major project of Apple, Apple invested more than $ 50 million on the research and development of the product. A team of almost 90 people excluding the sales and marketing team was involved in developing Lisa.
However, this product of Apple was not a successful product because of many issues like high price, availability and launch of cheap Macintosh by Apple, floppy disk etc. As a result, Steve Jobs had to step out of this project in 1980 to focus on Macintosh project. The total units of Lisa which could be sold were only 10000 in 2 years.
When Steve Jobs stepped out of this project, there was other team working on improving Lisa, however, it could never generate enough demand and as a result Apple had to discontinue Lisa Project as there were 2700 unsold units.
TimeLine of Apple Products
Below in the chart, we can find the timeline of the Apple LISA. The development of the product started in 1979 which continued till 1982, in 1983 finally the product was launched. However, in 1984, the product was launched again as LISA 2 which was again launched in1985 as XL and finally was discontinued.
Features of the product
The hardware of LISA used Motorola 68000 CPU and had 1 MB of RAM which could be extended up to 2MB. The computer uses 4 bit integer and a real time clock. If we talk about the CPU then, it was a very slow processing system. The computer was designed such that it is slow but reliable computer. The stability of the computer was high.
The product was a more advanced product but the price was very high. It had a memory which was protected, multitasking was allowed, operating system was based on hard disk, it had an advanced calculator, screen resolution was high and the screen was large. The product had 2 FileWare and double sided floppy drives. The mothe
oard of LISA was black and White and plain and Basic.
The product was developed as a game changer but sadly it was a failure. The reason being its high price and underperformance as per market expectation of 1983.
LISA Legacy
However, things to remember of LISA are that it was the first to develop GUI (Graphical User interface) based computer system and the concept of mouse was introduced by LISA. The Mac version of Apple still uses many features which were originally introduced by LISA.
Industry in 1983 – Other Players
The graph below market share of several personal computer
ands from 1975 to 2013. Looking at the graph we notice that in 1975 and 1976 we only had Macintosh in the market. In 1977, Apple II was launched which was again Apple product. Therefore, till 1980, Apple had a strong presence in the market. In 1981, IBM launched its computers and soon surpassed the cu
ent player – Apple and dominated the market till 2004. The reason behind IBM success was its cheap price. Around 1983 Compaq was launched . Therefore till 1993, we only had three players in the market – Apple, Apple and Compaq. Compaq and IBM had soon developed a strong presence in the market. They surpassed the Apple. But with Macintosh, Apple could revolutionize the market and it soon developed a strong presence in the market. The positioning of Apple Macintosh was also unique which no other
and enjoys in the market till the date.
If we see the chart below, then in 1983, we had Apple, IBM and Compaq. Clearly IBM was dominating the market because of its cheap price and large number of offerings which Apple was not able to provide. Cu
ently we have many
ands including HP as the market Leader, Dell, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, Mac, Acer etc.
Cu
ently HP, Dell, Lenove and Apple – Mac have a strong presence in the market.
The graph below shows the Apple Journey and its several products. We can see several products of Apple – Apple 1, Apple II, iPhone, Macintosh, iBook, I Movie, iPod, iTunes...