Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a built-in BASIC interpreter).

I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were doing.

I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held hostage by those guys."

So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.

As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x the old one.

They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would you think we need this?"