History of Coleco Adam
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Coleco announced the Adam at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in June 1983, and executives predicted sales of 500,000 by Christmas 1983. From
the time of the computer's introduction to the time of its shipment, the price increased, from USD $525 to $725.
The Adam announcement received favorable press coverage. Competitors such as Commodore and Atari almost immediately announced similar computer-printer bundles. The company announced an extensive marketing campaign, with television commercials for "boys age 8 to 16 and their fathers ... the two groups that really fuel computer purchases", and print advertisements in nontechnical publications like Time and People.
The Boston Phoenix, observing that Adam's $600 price was comparable to the lowest price for a letter-quality printer alone, stated "a nice trick if they can do it!" It was a trick; the computers were shown behind tinted glass that hid the fact that they were hand-made and had non-working tape drives. In June Coleco promised to ship the computer by August. In August it promised to ship a half million Adams by Christmas, but missed shipping dates of 1 September, 15 September, 1 October, and 15 October. Ahoy! reported that Coleco had not shipped by early October because of various problems. Each month of delay could mean losing the opportunity to sell 100,000 units, the magazine reported, adding that missing the Christmas season would result in "inestimable
losses". CEO Arnold Greenberg promised in late September to ship by "mid-October", but claimed that Adam was "not, primarily, a Christmas item". The printer was the main cause of the delays; after it failed to function properly at demonstrations, by November InfoWorld reported on "growing skepticism" about its reliability, speed, and
noise.[9]
Greenberg refused to say how many units he expected Coleco to ship by the end of the year. The company did not ship review units to magazines planning to publish reviews before Christmas, stating that all were going to dealers, but admitted that it would not meet the company's goal of shipping 400,000 computers by the end of the year; Kmart and JCPenney announced in November that it would not sell the Adam during the Christmas season because of lack of availability. Despite great consumer interest, Coleco shipped only
95,000 units by December, many of which
were defective; Creative Computing later reported that "the rumored return
rate was absolutely alarming". One store manager stated that five of six sold Adams had been returned, and expected that the sixth would likely be returned after being opened on Christmas. Coleco partnered with Honeywell Information Systems to open up repair chain stores around the nation. By December
1983 the press reported that company executives at a news conference "fielded questions about Coleco's problems with its highly-publicized new Adam home computer, which has been plagued by production delays and complaints of defects", with the company able to fulfill only one third of its Canadian orders for Christmas. Less than 10% of Adam units had defects, the company claimed, "well below industry standards".
An analyst stated in early 1984 that the company had targeted a very special area: primarily home users who have students or
teenage children who are writing term papers and who tend to be naive
computer users. Coleco has tried to make the Adam easy to use and attractive
to that group, consciously excluding other groups by the way that [they] configured the machine.
By March 1984 John J. Anderson declared Adam as having caused for Coleco "a trail of broken promises, unfulfilled expectations, and extremely skittish stockholders." On January 2, 1985, after continuing complaints about Adam failures and low sales, Coleco announced that it was discontinuing the Adam and would be selling off its inventory.[14] Coleco revealed that it lost $35 million in late 1983 (the time of the Adam's launch), along with a loss of $13.4 million in the first 9 months of 1984. Coleco did not reveal which company they were selling the inventory to, but stated that they had worked with this partner before. No final sales numbers were revealed of the Adam computer and Expansion, but one analyst estimated that Coleco had sold
350,000 Adams in 1983 and 1984.[17]
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