Why Bananabix (Banana Weetabix) are like the Microsoft Surface Duo(!)

Not a click-bait title at all - I'm quite serious. And the point won't take long to make, I promise.

Exactly as they sound, Bananabix are Weetabix cereal 'biscuits' infused with chunks of dried banana - and they're delicious. Add cold milk and enjoy any time of the day, etc.

There's one problem, however. They're darned hard to get hold of. In Berkshire, in the UK, we have supermarkets everywhere. Large and small, almost a dozen chains of shops. Every single shop sells the 'plain' Weetabix, most sell the various chocolate-infused Weetabix (nice idea, but way too sickly IMHO), many sell the 'Protein' variety, and a few sell 'Oatibix', presumably made without wheat. There's also a fruit and nut version seen occasionally.

And, just as occasionally, I see a shop selling my favourite. The legendary Banana Weetabix. And so I buy a clutch of packets - because I know darned well that it will be weeks before I find anywhere else that both stocks them at all and has some on the shelf.

At which point cut to Weetabix HQ and discussions on which products to highlight, invest in, and which to pull from sale. "Banana Weetabix has terrible sales", the manager quotes, "Only 20,000 units a year, compared to 20 million of the regular Weetabix! A thousand times less popular, so we should stop making it, it's clearly a bad product!"

Except that it's not. It's just that almost no one ever sees it on a shelf, so can't buy it in the first place. You can't extrapolate product worth from sales numbers alone.

At which point (and you can see where this is heading if you noted the title, above), I'll return to my usual stomping ground of technology. 

Microsoft's Surface Duo dual-screened smartphone, introduced in 2020, is a sumptuously made product that's genuinely innovative. I'm a huge fan, even though I don't think it's designed as a main smartphone for the masses. For anyone with any tech knowledge whatsoever, it's a perfect 'geek' companion device: - a folding tablet, a mini-laptop, a media consumption device, and so on.

Yet sales numbers have been very low. One reported figure is 50,000. That's thousand. Not million. 

For starters, Microsoft never made many (compared to typical phone production runs). Then they didn't advertise it. At all. So almost no one knew about it. And the few that did know about, the tech elite, were put off by a mountain of bugs and issues in the first firmware and which were reported on by reviewers with glee.

So Microsoft fixed the bugs, smoothed the interface, they even made a successor device, the Duo 2, adding in some genuine mass market features, such as triple camera, stereo speakers, and NFC. But, guess what, they forgot to advertise. Again. Still, almost no one realised that the product existed.

So, the familiar scene - Microsoft HQ this time. "How's the Surface Duo doing?" "Oh, very poor sales numbers, we struggled to shift 40,000 in our first year!", and so on. "Best we don't invest any more in this disaster product then." 

In the context of a product that wasn't advertised at all, I'm surprised the tens of thousands of existing sales were made, that's good detective work from those lucky geeks.

And now we have the Duo and Duo 2, no longer made, impossible to get repaired, and soon to be out of software support. All because the Duo concept was treated like Banana Weetabix - with management that didn't believe enough in the product to get it in the hands of consumers.

See also my related editorial "Microsoft, I'm fed up explaining to people why they can't get your greatest hardware invention..."!

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