Roadmap

There are cases where a company announced a future product too early, nearly everyone decided to wait for the future product, the company ran out of cash, and folded.

It has not been the SONOS style, but some companies have a three phase product cycle. New models are released with an introductory sale, prices then revert to the regular price, and the cycle ends with a ‘discontinued’ sale. The idea is to generate an early rush of publicity, sales to early adopters, building to the period of ‘regular’ sales, followed by a closeout period to capture customers who never buy anything that is not some sort of ‘deal’. All of this is planned in advance and profit generated by the product is evaluated on the whole life cycle, not each phase along the way. In one case I suspect that there is only one production run of a product. If the product sells through that batch early, there will not be any product available in that category until the next scheduled product is released.