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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9611876" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The main problem with the "oh, we can't make any changes or we'll piss the fans off!" rebuttal is that that precise thing also leads to disaster: a brand that cannot adapt, that treats all possible development or innovation as totally unacceptable to the customer base, will also fail. We see this sort of thing all the time, it's just not as Big and Flashy and Notable as New Coke was.This is one of the reasons why I have always emphasized the importance of presentation.Present someone with a product they love, but in alien and off-putting packaging, coloring, style, etc., and you'll see massive rejection rates. Present someone with a product they believe they hate, but with all the branding removed so they have to experience it "for the first time", and they may in fact love it.And to that end, I wish to present you with the "based on a true story" rebuttal to the New Coke story/lesson/whatever: Windows Vista and Windows 7.See, when Windows Vista launched, it got pretty much the same reception as New Coke did. People hated it. Some of their hatred was justified, Vista really did have performance issues on older hardware for example, but a lot of it was simply "I'm used to Windows XP, all this newfangled Windows Aero stuff is weird and off-putting, I hate it". The consumer response was concertedly and consistently negative, and Microsoft struggled in those years.Then, they started doing some more testing, to try to figure out where they'd gone wrong. Performance issues aside, people just openly HATED Vista, anything about Vista, even after fixes and improvements had been rolled out. So Microsoft tried something. They tried doing demos for a "new" version of Windows...that was literally just Windows Vista with a new coat of paint and all the fixes they'd already put out. And guess what happened?People loved it. They consistently gave the "new" version ratings no worse, and usually better, than Vista. It was called the "Mojave" experiment. It sure as hell wasn't perfect, and it occluded one of the greatest pain points for Vista (driver and hardware incompatibilities, which would only be seen during install, and thus totally absent from a pre-constructed demo computer.) But the point stands, people who were shown Vista without knowing it was Vista responded WAY better.Windows 7 was the end result of that process--one of the most popular Windows versions ever. Win7 had essentially everything Vista had, but smoother. Fewer issues, better code. It actually had even more stringent requirements than Vista, but running it on systems below spec was less onerous and more functional, even if still Not Ideal.So, more or less? We should be EXTREMELY careful to not generalize the "New Coke" phenomenon into an absolute law, a hard-and-fast standard of "sticking to the old ways, only making the tiniest changes, is the only way to retain customers." Sometimes, new really is going to do well, but the presentation is essential, you can't afford to alienate your customer base, and you absolutely, positively MUST ensure a smooth transition period between old and new. Other times, whether or not the product meets higher technical standards, replacing the old with the new is just not going to work.Sometimes, changing things is like trying to flip to New Coke. And other times, it's like rolling out Vista, having it bomb, and then rolling out Vista But Better Under A Different Name, and having it explode past expectations. Actually knowing what situation you're in is damned, damned hard.</blockquote>

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