I knew a guy who worked at MS when they were developing the Barney doll. He signed up to beta/play-test the doll since he had a son in the target age range. He

I knew a guy who worked at MS when they were developing the Barney doll. He signed up to beta/play-test the doll since he had a son in the target age range. He left work on Friday with the new Barney doll. When he came into work on the following Monday, he told his co-workers, "Looks like I'm going to HAVE to get a Barney doll for my son when they're released." The power of Barney... He also mentioned that when all the Actimates dolls and other consumer-related products were released, the internal-only Microsoft store looked like a techie-version of FAO Schwarz instead of a Microsoft-leaning Egghead software store. The bean counters at MS killed a lot of product ideas when they came up with the high revenue bar for any possible new products - as if anyone could predict that stuff accurately.