Product innovation is expensive. Too expensive to be mishandled by a careless handoff to your marketing and sales departments at precisely the moment when you could convert interest in your shiny new product into coveted cash generating sales.

I’m amazed – no, actually appalled – at the number of companies who spend tens of thousands of dollars developing a new product, take it to a trade show, gain press recognition and even Best of Show awards and then do absolutely nothing to capitalize on the interest generated or monetize their efforts with a thoughtful sales strategy.

Two recent examples stand out for me:

At last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Griffin introduced an iPad mount that screws onto the end of a microphone stand. It’s the perfect solution for me since I like to use my iPad as a teleprompter for online videos that I post to assorted blogs, and the mic stand holder would let me position the iPad directly above the tripod holding my camera.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the appeal of  this innovation, since Griffin generated a lot of media mentions including major technology blogs like Gizmodo and tuaw.

Glad You Like Us. Now Go Away.
But heading over to the Griffin website, I discovered that despite its announcement, the product wasn’t available for sale but was Coming Soon. What does that mean? It means that if I want the mic stand mount I have to keep checking back every few days until it actually becomes available. Griffin took no steps to capture my identity to inform me when it becomes available, didn’t ask me for an email address to keep in touch, didn’t  take a pre-order (which I would have paid for) and, in general, did absolutely nothing to connect with me and potentially sell me on this or other Griffin iPad related products.

They wasted an ideal opportunity to convert innovation into sales.

Based on the size of their booth at CES, I’d bet that Griffin spent more than $100,000 to attend the CES and showcase their products, not including the cost of developing the products themselves, yet their  efforts resulted in annoyance and alienation because they failed to implement any method to satisfy customer interest or plan to get their new products out of their development lab and into our hands.

It Gets Worse
As badly as Griffin handled the handoff from innovation to sales, they’re all-stars compared to MacWorld Best of Show Winner Scosche.

At this month’s Macworld Expo, the device manufacturer introduced a terrific innovation that iPod and iPhone users have been clamoring for: a Bluetooth connected pulse monitoring strap that will track your pulse and calories burned throughout your workout.

The product was so innovative that Macworld name the myTrek one of the Best in Show winners and published a lengthy article detailing the product’s features.

Result: Nothing
Who could ask for more? Well, I could. Because I actually tried to visit their website to buy the product. I’ve been waiting months for someone to introduce this precise product to track my workouts so I clicked over to their website and found…nothing.

That’s right. Nothing. Not a product page, not a press release, not a blog post, not a single mention. Confused, I turned to their Search utility and entered myTrek. Again, nothing.

Innovation FAIL
So Scosche invested thousands to develop a highly sought after product integrated with the single most popular mobile phone in the world, they introduced it at the biggest Apple show in the country and gained Best in Show honors yet they failed not only to promote the product on their corporate home page, but failed to create a web page for the product at all.

And the only thing truly surprising is that they’re not the only innovation-focused company that treats its products with such disregard.

Corporate innovation is intended to produce results. Results that can be measured in dollars collected. There’s simply no excuse for any company to invest in innovation projects yet ignore the revenue  producing potential of those projects by failing to integrate sales and marketing functions from the  start so that the company can maximize the return on their investment and realize the full potential of their innovation.

When most people think of innovation and innovative companies, they mistakenly envision creative geniuses holed up in research labs pursuing that Eureka moment when they miraculously discover The Idea.

You know The Idea. The one truly transformative, groundbreaking and revolutionary business concept that will change not just a company, but an entire industry. That’s The Idea.

The problem is, The Idea really isn’t about innovation at all. In fact, ideas are actually pretty easy to come by. Spend some time at an entrepreneurs conference and you’ll hear at least a dozen ideas that you’re convinced can be the next Google, or Groupon, or whatever tomorrow’s raging hot company is.

Talk to any company that set up an idea forum for their employees to contribute to. They’ll they’ll you that they have so many great ideas that it’s damaging their capacity for innovation. With so many ideas – including those that are genuinely brilliant – to sift through, analyze, prioritize and assess, actual innovation bogs down.

Ideas are a Commodity
Ideas aren’t the problem. Execution is.

Those companies that you envision as innovation leaders aren’t brilliant because of The Idea, they’re brilliant because they had the nerve, the talent and the resilience to actually develop, refine and launch The Idea. They took The Idea from boardroom to showroom.

The Life and Death of an Idea
Several years ago, I witnessed both the inception of The Idea and its ultimate demise while running a company in the packaging industry.

As the manufacturer of label applicators (the machines that apply labels to products), I worked with companies that had special material handling issues that we were uniquely positioned to solve. While working with a major memory card manufacturer in San Diego, we were confronted with a production bottleneck that centered around label application.

The manufacturer was set up for short runs of memory cards with different memory capacities and needed to run 500 16GB cards, then run 1000 8GB cards, then run 300 32GB cards. The problem was that automatic labeling systems took over 20 minutes to changeover from one roll of labels to the next and was killing their productivity, forcing them to resort to hand applying labels to each tiny card.

Ask Why Not?
While brainstorming with my engineers, we asked a question that had never been asked before: what if we changed out the entire labeling head instead of the roll of labels? What if the labeling head itself were made as an interchangeable component instead of a fixed component?

This was The Idea. There was nothing like it in the industry and we had the engineering ability to rapidly prototype, gain proof of concept and ultimately execute The Idea.

And it worked. Product changeover time was reduced from 20 minutes to as little as 40 seconds. The client was so eager to get several machines that they paid the initial development costs in exchange for exclusive rights to the system for one year.

Death Was Swift
Then I sold the company and witnessed how The Idea can meet a swift and brutal demise, despite its promise and potential.

As novel as The Idea was, its brilliance would lay in its execution. The interchangeable labeling heads weren’t enough to guarantee success. The Idea’s success lay in its ability to handle and present the memory cards to the labeling head, to apply the labels with 1/32″ precision and to collect the labeled cards at the end of the process. Nothing that devoted engineers couldn’t resolve.

However, as most companies find out, conceiving The Idea is the sexy, fun and exciting part, but execution determines The Idea’s ultimate success and requires months of boring and tedious work to perfect in the real world. Ultimately, The Idea died when the new business owners declared that they were in the production business, not the innovation business and abandoned The Idea’s refinement process.

And now The Idea awaits another company to discover its potential and put it into production. Or maybe we weren’t as innovative as we thought, and we were just creative thinkers with an idea, not The Idea.

Update:

I found this raw footage of the labeling system on an archived hard disk. Note that even with my clumsiness in loading the labeling head, I still get it locked on in about 20 seconds.

Oregon football tonight combines two of my favorite things: the national football championship game and Nike innovation. And, believe me, there is no way Oregon would be playing in the BCS championship game without Nike’s passionate involvement in the Oregon program.

For most of my life, college football programs attracted and retained talent largely on the basis of their reputation. The college powerhouses remained largely unchanged from year to year. For those of us who grew up humming Boomer Sooner or admiring the steadfast simplicity of Alabama’s field presence, all was good. Year after year, these successful programs could count on attracting fresh recruits and replacement talent due solely to their prominent reputations.

So, what’s a poor doormat program like Oregon to do when facing in conference rivals like USC, UCLA and Stanford? Without a Rose Bowl appearance since the Eisenhower administration, and a lengthy record of on-field futility, the Oregon Ducks decided to outimagine their gridiron opponents. Not on the field, but in the recruiting trenches.

Oregon embarked on an innovative program to become the most recognizable, technologically advanced and, quite simply, the coolest collegiate football program in the country.

They decided that all those historic, legacy football programs could keep their history. Penn State generic uniforms? Snooze. USC’s cardinal and gold? Keep ‘em. Michigan’s maize and blue? Yawn.

Oregon fields a different uniform every single week. They never wear the same combination in the same football season (and there’s even a website that tracks every week’s uniform combinations). They have entire tractor trailers devoted to inventory of every color component of every uniform. 15 years ago, Oregon was green and yellow. This year they’re any combination of carbon fiber, black, neon green, white, silver, dark green, yellow and grey.

They receive hypercool products directly from Nike’s Innovation Lab, before any competitor, collegiate or professional, is even aware they exist. An entirely new “uniform system” that incorporates the latest lightweight, moisture wicking fabrics with Flywire strands to increase their strength while reducing their weight, integrated lightweight Deflex padding enabling the players to run faster without sacrificing any protection, receiver gloves that display the Oregon “O” when the hands are positioned to catch the ball, and an all new football cleat that incorporates the Flywire construction and introduces a new cleat pattern to promote speed.

You can argue that the Nike gadgetry is all marketing puffery and has no impact on how the players actually perform, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the 18 year old Southern Californian running back who’s picking his preferred football program thinks all the technology, the choices, the national exposure, the affiliation with Nike HQ and their Innovation Lab is the ultimate in cool. So cool that he’s willing to trek to Oregon to go to school instead of UCLA.

Great football programs are built on talent, and Nike’s founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight created the ultimate player draw: unattainable Nike swag. Every week. Showcased on national tv.

And, by the way, with just hours to go before tonight’s kickoff, we still don’t know for sure what Oregon will wear on the field. White pants, grey or black? The Beatles never generated this much pre-show anticipation.

I’m rooting for Nike tonight. And hoping Oregon pulls it out, too.

Examining Sony’s abject failure to make any impact in the personal MP3 player market, noted author and blogger David Akers concluded that Sony’s failure was largely due to unfortunate bad timing, not Sony’s strategic decisions or lack of innovative thinking.

Having examined Sony’s repeated failures to exploit their overwhelming market positions and brand magic to gain traction and market share in personal MP3 players, notebook computers, e-books, digital cameras and flat screen tvs, I believe that Sony’s failures can be attributed almost exclusively to their inability to incorporate design thinking into their product conception, development and execution and a singular reliance upon hardware appearance and technical distinction to define themselves with consumers.

That previous sentence was personally painful to write. I’ve been a Sony devotee since the early 1980′s. I’ve owned virtually every type of media device that they’ve ever created, starting with the cassette playing Walkman, the CD playing Walkman, the mini-Disc playing and recording Walkman, digital cameras, digital video cameras, ebooks and VAIO notebooks. I was a Sony fanboy before the term was even coined.

And I was perpetually disappointed.

Not by the quality of their products, which was uniformly excellent, but by their perpetual embrace of proprietary standards and refusal to open their technology ecosystem to their industrial compatriots. They did not play well with others.

Sony cameras worked only with the Sony MemoryStick, a media format adopted by exactly zero electronics manufacturers. So, while other PC users could slip their SD memory cards directly into a slot in the side of their PC, Sony users had to perform an intermediary step and find a USB dongle with a Memory Stick slot. But, since the quality of the pictures was great, I put up with the inconvenience.

Engaging with the Sony video cam was significantly worse. The camera would only connect to a PC with a FireWire port, not the universally available USB port. But, since I had a FireWire enabled VAIO, I was OK. Until I imported the video and discovered that Sony would only import the video in a proprietary Sony file format that could not be edited in any third party movie editing software program.

Their VAIO notebook introduced similar user frustrations. Although my VAIO was a gorgeously designed unit encased in a distinctive metallic purple, Sony simply refused to play well with third party accessories and ultimately had to be retired in favor of an HP tablet computer that promised to behave better.

And Sony’s recent foray into the ebook market did nothing to reclaim their previously held mantle as developers of the best designed electronics in the world. Although their ebook was visually distinctive, solidly manufactured and a pleasure to read, it enraged its users with its needlessly complex steps necessary to load content onto the ebook. Relying, as always, on a proprietary PC -based software platform to display and deliver ebook content, Sony infuriated Mac users who had no ability to load content on the Sony ebook. And even when I did load the proprietary Sony software on a Windows partition on my Mac, the software was so poorly designed, buggy and difficult to use that the entire experience of using their ebook was irreparably diminished.

It’s my decades of experience with Sony’s failure to deliver a single consumer focused, delightfully engaging and thoughtfully designed user experience that convinces me that Mr. Akers’ conclusion is dead wrong and will only provide another excuse for Sony to hide behind.

Sony’s problems with the MP3 players wasn’t that they mistimed the market. It’s that they never conceived the market that Apple imagined and created. It never occurred to them to create an absolutely delightful device AND a surrounding user environment that included finding music, listening to music, buying music, sharing music and syncing music. Apple didn’t win the MP3 player war because they timed the market better. They invented an entirely new immersive mobile music experience that just happened to rely on the iPod as the handheld component necessary to provide mobile music.

For Apple, it wasn’t about the hardware. For Sony, it’s always about nothing but the hardware.

For proof, simply look at the litany of missed opportunities that should have been directly in Sony’s sweet spot: game players as mobile phones (Sony missed it entirely, while the Apple iPhone is now the world’s largest selling portable gaming platform, eclipsing the multi-year headstart of Sony’s PSP), notebook computers (Sony’s insistence on incorporating proprietary components relegated them to single digit market share), MP3 players ( a market that Sony owned and surrendered entirely), digital cameras (again, an insistence on proprietary components limited their appeal, and they’re now an also ran), ebooks (they had the early lead with a gorgeous product that made the Kindle look like a cheap plastic toy, but again Sony’s insistence on proprietary software and file formats allowed Amazon’s Kindle to grab a dominant position they will not relinquish) digital music sales (Sony has an enormous catalog, but their feeble attempts to sell digitally were hampered by proprietary software and file formats, fanatical concern for piracy and a miserable user experience in finding, buying and syncing music.)

Every failure in every major segment can be attributed to the same institutional arrogance, intransigence and strategic ineptitude that has defined Sony for over 30 years. They believe they are wonderful technology designers because they produce visually distinctive products. But physical design simply isn’t sufficient to create an entirely new market and deliver an exceptional user experience.

Sony didn’t fail to extend their domination from portable cassette and CD players to MP3 players because of timing. They failed because they lacked vision. They perceived the market for mobile music as just another pretty device. Apple proved that the market actually wanted a thoughtful and delightful music experience. The difference between the two is software, not hardware. And Sony has never demonstrated nor developed the capacity to envision and create a software experience that delivered more than frustration, confusion and exasperation.

In the technology arena, there are several competitors who strike fear into the hearts of their competitors: Apple, Microsoft, and Google so dominate their technology sectors, that entrepreneurs and investors will intentionally avoid any attempt at direct competition with these behemoths.

But, as evidenced by last week’s Fortune list of the 20 dumbest business moments of 2010, being big doesn’t guarantee market success.

While Apple had a banner year and generated an entire new computing segment with its iPad tablet, Google had three major failures with their Buzz service, Nexus One mobile phone and GoogleTV, and Microsoft killed their Kin mobile phones just over a month after their widely hailed, billion dollar launch.

What each of these product disasters had in common wasn’t a necessarily a lack of innovation, but an absence of design appreciation and the essential need to delight and amaze their users with a products simplicity and utility.

Size Doesn’t Guarantee Success
In fact, I believe that many large companies believe that they can compel the success of their new ideas through the application of brute marketing force. After all, who is going to tell Microsoft that their social media friendly phones will fail if Microsoft is willing to commit $1 billion to their launch? Did I mention that they’re social media friendly? How could they fail in a Facebook world?

Easy.

Just like Google’s Buzz and GoogleTV, Microsoft’s Kin phones delivered miserable user experiences. They were too complex. Too difficult to use. They violated users’ assumptions about how things should work without offering a better alternative, just a different alternative.

Ideas Are Easy
What these failures demonstrate is that coming up with a creative idea for a product is actually the easy part. The hard part is selecting the right idea and implementing it exquisitely.

As a design company whose culture is rooted in delivering exceptional user experiences, Apple hit another home run not just with its conception of a touch-controlled tablet computer, but with its execution of a thoroughly delightful and intuitively simple device that resonated with virtually every user who picked it up.

Apple relied not only on its genius for creative concepts, but on its organization, its internal processes and its metrics in determining what products to pursue and when they’re ready for release.

It’s not their size (which recently surpassed a $300 billion market cap) that fuels their success, but their innovative business model.

Culture Trumps Strategy
Microsoft and Google may rival Apple in size, but what they lack is the design culture that infuses Apple. Microsoft may try to copy specific Apple successes (see their attempt to replicate Apple retail outlets) but without the corporate DNA that fuels innovation and insists on delivering memorable user experiences, their duplicative efforts are nearly guaranteed to disappoint.

Google has fallen into the same trap, believing that their dominant success in the search engine market will transfer just as easily into any technology venture they elect to pursue. But, despite being named one of the most innovative companies in the country by both Fast Company and Business Week, their inclusion seems reliant upon their intentions to enter new markets, not their ability to actually succeed in any new venture. At some point, the magic of their search engine prowess will fade and their perception as an innovative company will become dependent upon delivering memorable, exciting and successful new products and services.

Will this be the year?

The National Science Foundation released a disturbing study recently that revealed that only 9% of American companies engaged in any product or process innovation during the three-year study period (2006-08).

Frankly, I’m not surprised with the near absence of corporate innovation because I see so few companies that encourage a culture of innovation.

Too many CEOs focus exclusively on improving financial metrics – increasing earnings and keeping a tight control over costs. Few understand their corporate value can be linked directly to their embrace of innovation and their capacity to constantly renew themselves.

That’s exactly what Apple has been doing, and its devotion to designing new customer experiences centered around technology has contributed to a 1,300 percent rise in its stock price in the past 10 years and a market capitalization that exceeds that of Microsoft.

Apple keeps innovating because it has intentionally created a culture of innovation. The company’s commitment to design and innovation is built into its DNA and enables it to foster, create, and execute radical ideas and remain in a perpetual state of reinvention.

Commitment to design and innovation is not the purview exclusively of large companies. Small companies actually have the capacity to move faster and more nimbly than their larger competitors, and it’s significantly easier to adopt cultural imperatives in a small company than a large one.

So, what are the essential cultural elements that your company needs to adopt to encourage innovation?

Purpose – Business leaders who can articulate a corporate vision with the right language can inspire their employees to perform heroic feats. Companies such as Apple, Nike, Amazon, Herman Miller, and 3M are all design and innovation leaders that inspire their employees with clear corporate visions of who they are, why they’re important, and where they’re headed.

They don’t inspire with challenges of 7% top line growth or the extension of an existing product line. Their vision is much broader: They want to change the world in their own unique ways. And they believe they are the agents for that change.

Challenge – You can’t gain a competitive advantage from doing business as usual in the same way that virtually every one of your competitors operates. Innovators and design thinkers create new solutions to problems that other companies are unwilling or unable to address. Take a look at every touch point in your organization and ask yourself if each one is delightful and memorable for your customers.

Why should calls to help centers be frustrating? Why don’t you have instructional videos posted for every one of your products? How can your packaging be reduced and improved? You’re surrounded by challenges if you’re brave enough to take them on. And when you succeed, your corporate differences will be clearly defined.

Encouragement – Leaders in innovative companies encourage their employees to try new things and to test new ideas despite the certainty that taking on challenging projects will inevitably lead to some failures.

Apple had monumental flops with the Lisa and the Newton. Nike had divisive fair trade issues to overcome. Even legendary 3M went through a lean period of innovation when its focus drifted in the early 2000s.

But like all successful design companies, those who emerge with the greatest successes are the ones that encourage, embrace, and celebrate failure. They just ensure that they failed fast and learn lessons from each disappointment. Failure expands knowledge, builds courage, reveals your strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately makes success a little sweeter.

Originally posted at Spin Sucks.

A front page article in last week’s Wall Street Journal documented the demise of Liz Claiborne, one of women’s fashions most successful product lines for 34 years. The company that pioneered working women’s apparel after its introduction in 1976, Liz Claiborne has been removed from virtually every tony retailer and is now available exclusively through JC Penney.

It was a precipitous and entirely avoidable fall.

Liz Claiborne broke the first commandment of branding: Be true to your clients and yourselves.

Claiborne made its name by designing stylish career wear for the millions of women, particularly younger women, entering the workforce. Their pieces were consistently styled and well made, delivering a specific brand promise to the women who stocked their closets with Claiborne ensembles that could be mixed and matched to create multiple outfits from a handful of separates.

Claiborne developed a loyal and trusting following of women who appreciated her collections. But with her retirement from the company in 1989, the brand began to suffer. There was no designer who shared Liz Claiborne’s design aesthetic and without a design leader, the company regressed to a financial leader whose focus was the bottom line, not the hemline.

Design by committee emerged, diluting the Claiborne brand promise in a fruitless pursuit of the youth culture. Their working women loyalists took notice and turned their backs on uninspired and confusing Claiborne collections that were considered fashion forward but not geared toward working women, the brand’s core constituency.

The dispiriting Claiborne story was in sharp contrast to the story that Jay Greene recounts in his book Design is How it Works. Porsche has remained remarkably successful in an industry that has few perpetually thriving automakers. Porsche attributes their success to an unyielding devotion to the design principles encompassed in the very first 911 that debuted in 1963.

Since their very first car, Porsche has remained true to its design DNA by incorporating specific design cues – intakes instead of a radiator grill, a car that always tapers to the rear, open wheel rims to display the strong brake calipers, front fenders always higher than the hood, ignition always on the left of the steering wheel and vertically oriented dashboards – that support their vision of a car that is all about driving performance and authenticity.

Porsche has never varied from a design approach that produces cars that their own designers crave. They never cut corners. They never adopt trends that risk the company’s credibility. And they never try to appeal to everybody.

Porsche designers intuitively understand the desires of their most passionate drivers and develop new cars with them in mind. Liz Claiborne took a different tack and abandoned their brand promise and with it their most loyal clients in pursuit of a younger, more active customer. They alienated their most loyal customers without generating any traction with the fickle and trend conscious youth market who want nothing to do with the company who makes clothes for their mothers.

Porsche has had an endless string of hits, including their Boxster, Cayman, Cayenne and Panamera and reported record profits in 2009. Liz Claiborne has virtually ceased to exist. Breaking your brand promise appears to have severe repercussions. If only the Claiborne executives drove Porsches, they’d understand.

How many other successful brands have hastened their corporate demise by abandoning their core principles and their most loyal customers? Sadly, I’ll bet it’s long. Real long.

What defines your Microsoft experience?

Frustration?… Confusion?… Anger?

My personal list of Microsoft-inspired adjectives is lengthy, and nowhere on that list appears the word delight.

Frustrated with their perennial regard as the ugly and undesirable stepsister to Apple’s beloved fair maiden Microsoft decided to take action to reclaim their throne and assert their benevolent rule in the technology kingdom.

So, what does Microsoft, in all their imperial wisdom do to stand apart and reassert the provenance of their brand? Why they copy Apple’s retail store, of course. Right down to the fixtures.

Gizmodo acquired a leaked PowerPoint presentation detailing the design of the planned Microsoft retail stores, and after reviewing their plans one thought springs instantly to mind: plagiarism. Seriously, if a college architecture or design student submitted this presentation as a class project to create a new retail design, their professor would be entirely justified in red stamping “PLAGIARISM” across the cover page and charging the student with academic fraud.

When will companies learn that copying innovation and clever design does not bestow those qualities upon your organization?

I predict that within 24 months, Microsoft will realize the futility of copying Apple’s retail efforts and shutter their retail stores. The reasons why:

1. Apple delivers a unique Apple Experience that Microsoft cannot emulate, no matter how hard they try. Apple is a design company that expresses their design innovation through technology. Microsoft is a technology company that attempts to apply design elements to their technology after it’s created. Apple delivers an experience. Microsoft delivers a product. Delivering an exceptional user experience is in Apple’s corporate DNA. It is absent in Microsoft’s corporate DNA. And it’s not about to change.
2. Apple has total control over all of their hardware and software products, Microsoft simply licenses their technology to third parties. Apple maintains its near total control over its user experience by designing, developing and manufacturing every device themselves. This maniacal level of control ensures that there are no missteps in delivering a memorable and delightful user experience. But Microsoft adopted a dramatically different business model, licensing their technologies to thousands of companies to integrate into third party computers and devices. Microsoft’s licensing model expands Microsoft’s market but eliminates their ability to control how the software and hardware components interact with the user.
3. Apple focuses on simplicity while the Microsoft universe is inherently complex. Compared to the thousands of different products that integrate Microsoft technology, Apple offers only a handful of computers, tablets, phones and devices. Their limited product offerings allow Apple to retain control while the millions of iterations of Microsoft products expand the PC universe but add technical complexity and near infinite opportunities for user frustration.
4. It’s the culture, stupid. Steve Jobs instilled an innovation centered culture in Apple that has allowed them to create entirely new segments of technology. Microsoft is not known for their innovation and has not fostered a corporate culture that celebrates innovation and understands how to generate new ideas and new markets. And they apparently never will.
5. Microsoft can’t compete on price with their retail competitors. Apple maintains rigorous control over its distribution channel. They do not allow their products to be discounted, so the price you pay at the Apple store is the same that you pay at Best Buy. However, Microsoft will not be able to discount their offerings or offer the same number of configurations as their larger retail competitors. So why would anyone pay more to buy at Microsoft?
6. Renting your store out for birthday parties does not qualify as a brand differentiator. Nuff said.
7. Opening your stores next to existing Apple stores magnifies your lameness. We all know who was first. We all know who copied whom. Opening your store adjacent to an Apple store reinforces the perception that you have no original ideas.
8. Microsoft’s not cool. Apple is. Do you know anyone who camped out overnight to be the first to get the new Zune? Of course you don’t. No one does. Because Microsoft products are cool anti-matter.

The clock is ticking. When the last door shuts I’ll let you know.

A terrific article in today’s New York Times by Edward Niedermeyer prompted me to document my own belief, from the day I heard of GM’s announcement of their eco-friendly Volt hybrid that it would be a massive and historic commercial failure.

There may be no single automobile ever made that has garnered as much positive press and unfettered support from the press, the green lobby and the government. They desperately want the Volt not only to succeed but to be a game changer, a tipping point in the auto industry.

And I’m here to tell you it won’t be a game changer. It will tip no points, and it will end up losing massive sums of money.

It would be hard for any product to live up to the anticipation and hype that’s surrounded the Volt. The Volt’s  been assigned messianic status in the auto industry, preordained to be the savior of GM, the transformer of all transportation and the harbinger of an entirely new way of thinking in the auto industry.

But the Volt has been destined to fail from day one. Rather than asking their designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, GM should have asked them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Their objective from the start shouldn’t have been limited to the objective of building a new hybrid car, but to create new interactions, entertainments, immersive, emotional activities that are embodied in an entirely new way to travel.

But GM is not a strategic, design-centered company. They’re a tactical company that has never demonstrated a capacity for design brilliance or its commensurate risk taking.

Want proof? Take a look at the actual Volt that they’ll be attempting to sell this fall for $41,000. It’s nothing more than a Toyota Prius with a $15,000 Chevy bowtie on its grille.

Contrast this bland design with the original concept car. It was bold, it was edgy, it stood out and made a statement. So, of course, GM had to assign some internal committee to tone it down a little. After all, they want it to appeal to the largest audience possible.

Their design killing efforts proved Mark Twains adage that “I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”

I believe that brands are the promise of an experience. Great brands can project our hopes and dreams and aspirations. They broadcast who we are and what we believe.

So what is it that GM wants to convey with this rolling testament to corporate mediocrity that hasn’t already been captured and owned by the Prius?

Beyond the branding and design failures, GM has to overcome enormous financial, technical and practical hurdles that all conspire to doom the volt.

It’s expensive at $41,000 – which doesn’t include the price of the $2000 charger you’ll need in your garage.

Its electric motor range of 40 miles is virtually guaranteed never to be met in real world conditions. Subtract mileage when it’s cold or when you’re operating the AC or the radio.

And, when its battery needs to be replaced, get ready for the $8000 sticker shock.

The Volt is a corporate response to political pressures. It validates the contention that great design and revolutionary concepts don’t emerge from corporate boardrooms and government bureaucracies. The Volt is exactly what we would expect from Government Motors, and that’s the tragedy.

Imagine what could have been produced if Apple were to design a car from scratch. Or if Google teamed with Ideo to create a new commuter vehicle. I don’t know what they would conceive, but I do know one thing for certain: it wouldn’t be the Volt. And it wouldn’t require hundreds of millions in subsidies to attract buyers, and it wouldn’t be conceived without considering alternative green technologies that could be integrated into its design.

If the Volt symbolizes the new GM and the new Michigan, as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm claims, pray for GM and Michigan.