Conquistador3
Le Comte de Frou Frou
Product design is challenging: each 'hit' will have several 'misses', and dozens (hundreds?) of ideas that never make it even to a prototype stage.
As a chain 'geek', I have rooted through a number of chainsaw related patents, and am amazed at the things people have tried over the past 75 years.
Some do not 'work' when first released, but find a market later. E.g. saw chain with replaceable cutters, now used on some harvester chains.
The Intenz product is a great idea, and a step up from the spring-loaded tips, offered by one company, to address the chain tension problem.
If nobody tried to innovate, we would still be using stone axes.
Philbert
The guy who invented the amigdala probably tested it before rushing it onto the market. Throughly I may add: you don't want to deal with a bunch of angry and possibly cannibal cavemen.
And that's my point: Oregon usually test their products before putting them on the market. Throughly I may add. The Intenz bar probably didn't make the cut, quite literally, but somebody gave the go ahead anyway and a lot of saw owners were left with a product that wasn't just up to the task.
Honda puts on the market less than 25% the industrial/power equipment engines their R&D department comes up with. The rest are not merely scrapped and forgotten. Data and experience are gathered from the failures. Lessons are learned. The point is you cannot just put something on the market because it's new. It has to work, and work well. I remember when Sony introduced the Discman, their first portable CD player: it hadn't been throughly tested (or was simply rushed through without much care) and the plastic gears that moved the laser lens on the rail had a nasty habit of losing their teeth after a year or so of daily commuting use. Sharp, Toshiba, Philips etc merely filled the gap and Sony took an image hit that really affected their mobile device operations for years. When they introduced the MiniDisc, the portable players were massively overbuilt precisely because of this lesson learned and to this day the digital Walkman can take a ridiculous amount of punishment and keep on soldiering on.
Morale: not all donuts are baked with a hole in them but the smart baker learns form his mistakes.