Shipping, launching, and landing get treated as one event with three names. They are three different events, and only the third one is the point.
The three, separated
Shipping is an engineering fact: the code is in production and works. Launching is a marketing fact: the market knows it exists. Both are fully inside your control, and both got cheap. Landing is a customer fact and the only one that lives outside your building: a person who used to do something one way now does it with your product, gets real value from the switch, and keeps doing it after the novelty fades.
That is why landing is hard. Everything up to launch is a thing you do. Landing is a thing a customer does, and you can only make it more or less likely. Cheap building and automated launching left the landing gap exactly as hard as it always was.
The test and the four failures
The test: point at a specific behavior a customer used to do differently, now does with your product, and would be annoyed to lose. Not signups. Not week-one activation. Not a demo. Durable behavior change with realized value, or it did not land.
It fails four ways, each invisible on launch day: the demo that never becomes a habit, the onboarding that activates once and goes silent by month two, the launch with no owner past GA, and the feature that gets used but moves no economic number. An org that treats launch as the finish line will staff and reward everything up to release and nothing in the ninety days that decide whether release mattered. Fix the definition first: landing is durable behavior change with realized value. Everything before it is a means to it, not a substitute for it.