zapmail

$300 million lessons - where did it go wrong?

History always intends to glorify the successful model, not the failed one. However, failure is a crucial and inalienable part of the updating technology.Unexpected failures often could leave us the profound revelation.

Innovation on Context, not Vision

A Canadian former ice hockey player once said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." The massive loss of FedEx was due to the biased forecast of direction of the technology. FedEx saw that the fax machines in that era are quite expensive and quality was not good.Thus, the company planned to establish its unique network with the proprietary fax machines, but FedEx ignored the booming of global fax context and digital transmissions. 

At the time of launch year of Zapmail, the fax machines were expensive and digital transmissions were undeveloped, but the society and scientific technology was going to move forward, within two years, fax machines dropped in price and improved in quality. The users found that it's quite cost-effective to buy a fax machine to apply the public network. It's no doubt that the one that with more users was the winner. FedEx had been focusing on the market of traditional way of electronic service delivery from one place to another place and not saw the market of potential value of fax machines. It's true that information technology can lead to a company with highly profits, but underestimating the development tendency often got the company itself caught up in the adversity. 

What can others learn from the mistakes?

As a process innovation, Zapmail was of great venture for focusing on service not a physical product. hence, it was difficult to do user research and testing, let alone feedback. By starting weak, even  if Zapmail could solve the current problem of electronic delivery, it still couldn't move on to the growth stage for instant success and soon after declined. Actually, the potential problem of Zapmail was lack of sufficient and complete pre-launch testing before introduction to the market, which led to the uncertainty. As designers or marketers of service innovation, before inputting it into the market in a large scale, have to check the new design technology and delivery process, and continually adjust ment and improvement according to the results in the small and limited application range.