Viewdata--a product in search of a market?

One of the classic marketing fiascos of the pasr decade was the $200 million boondoggle project hatched at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, known as Picturephone® service. Heralded as the new telephone of the 1980s, rosy sales projections suggested that as many as 1 000 000 Americans would have Picturephone® sets in their homes and offices by the mid 1980s. Wile these figures look delightfully quaint today, the shareholds of AT&T must not have felt so amused by that $200 million expenditure on engineering a system that no one wanted. Through the year 2000, MBA students at Harvard will be able to rediscover in case study form just how dangerous it can be for an organization to allow its engineering department to dictate new product development to the marketing staff. Of course in the Picturephone® case, AT&T could proffer a legitimate excuse: the Vice President of Marketing position at Bell had lain dormant and abandoned for almost a quarter of the century. After all, who needs to sell telephone service?