One of my former employers dealt a lot with Apple. The CEO saw the secretive nature of Apple and decided he also wanted to build our products in a secretive manner. Our company was only 300 people so they were very small teams that worked on new products and couldn't tell anyone within the company. Anyway both products became a flop because of fundamental flaws in not meeting customer requirements even though they were innovative in a sense. When they first opened up to the nature of the products, I raised serious questions to which no one had answers. Ultimately those products never went into production. Meanwhile other existing products we were market leaders in were 2 years behind competitors at that point and the company end up being acquired for IP alone.
Yes, the company initially had a lead. Some major customer would evaluate and buy our product. However while these secretive projects were going on, most of the engineering resources were put into those projects. Meanwhile the competitors continued to improve their products. When the secretive project flopped, we quickly jumped back to the original products but we were quite behind and never caught up. We were forced to pursue niche markets.
