So just the shifting around itself hurts productivity. In the end, focused companies do better than unfocused ones. That will usually drive them out of a company in it's entirety. It is much worse to start a project like Newton, and then kill it, then to never have started it at all. So the trick to all this is about balance and teamwork.
Teams can have their own focus, but they have to fit in the big picture.
Both to send a message to all the other projects, and to keep the company going in the right direction. Newton was too different. But the implementation didn't fit at all. It used its own OS, its own tools, and didn't work exceptionally well with anything else. It didn't leverage the Mac market as well as it could of, and what was being developed for the Newton wasn't being used to help the company at large.