Audrey by 3Com, possibly one of the most failed creations done by the company and is possibly. Ergo Audrey Internet is an internet appliance that enabled the consumer to only browse the web and nothing else. It contained nice computer specs and would have been pretty decent except that it was missing one very important component; it didn’t have a hard drive, meaning that you couldn’t save anything onto it, like you would with a PC or a Mac. This project was soon scraped after its initial launch.
Audrey demonstrates a very important lesson when being an entrepreneur and bringing a new product into the world. This lesson is, always do market research. Though there may have been other factors that could have brought the end of this product, the major issue was doing the research behind the idea to see whether or not this product is desired or not. Being that it’s not portable, it was no better than a really bad desktop.
The money lost on this project could have been spent on creating a more beneficial expenditure if only the company had spent more time gathering accurate market data and giving a more realistic demand forecast.
http://www.retrothing.com/2005/11/oddball_micros__5.html
Audrey