Osborne effect

This belief appeared in the media almost immediately after the company's September 1983 bankruptcy:[4] To give the jazzy $2,495 Osborne Executive a running start, Adam began orchestrating publicity early in 1983.

[4] Pre-announcement is done for several reasons: to reassure current customers that there is improvement or lower cost coming, to increase the interest of the media and investors in the company's future prospects, and to intimidate or confuse competitors.

Interviews with former employees cast doubt on the idea that Osborne's downfall was caused solely by announcement ahead of availability.

Consequently, after inventory of the Osborne 1 had been cleared out, McCarthy believed, customers switched to Kaypro, causing monthly sales of the Executive to fall to less than 10% of its predecessor.

Rather than discard the motherboards, the vice president sold Osborne leadership on the idea of building them into complete units and selling them.

Soon, $2 million was spent to turn the motherboards into completed units, and for CRTs, RAM, floppy disk drives, to restore production and fabricate the molded cases.

In 1978, North Star Computers announced a new version of its floppy disk controller with double the capacity which was to be sold at the same price as their existing range.

[citation needed] When Sega began publicly discussing their next-generation system (eventually released as the Dreamcast), barely two years after launching the Saturn, it became a self-defeating prophecy.

[8] Another example of the Osborne effect took place as a result of Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop's implementation of the plan to shift away from Symbian to Windows Phone for its mobile software platform.