Letting the cat out of the bag

At Microsoft, the pre-launch can last for years. Long before it mutated into Vista, the world´s number-one software company was talking about what was likely to go into Longhorn, the codename for the project. It was perhaps a foolhardy move, as many of the features that the company claimed it would have in the final shipping version fell off the list. Researchers such as Jehoshuah Eliashberg of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Meng Su of Beijing University and Cornell University´s Vithala Rao regard company size and market dominance as indicators of conservatism in pre-announcement. Such companies do not have to use the tool and do not have to run the risk of being accused of trying to sell vapourware. But Microsoft had other reasons for being so early to promote Longhorn.According to research performed by Barry Bayus, Sanjay Jain and Ambar Rao for the Journal of Marketing Research in 2001, some 50 per cent of products are pre-launched in some way.