First was its reliance on market forecasting to drive production. Even the most successful PC makers, such as IBM, Apple, and Compaq, were chronically bedeviled by their inability to accurately forecast demand in a market driven by ever shorter product cycles. They were either caught with short supplies of hot products, causing them to lose sales to competitors, or stuck with excess inventories of slow sellers, which clogged the distribution channels and often had to be sold at a loss to move them out. Even with the best forecasting, the indirect model was plagued by the need to hold inventory at each step.