Is the Quick Death of Failed Tech Products a Good Thing? 181
Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, HumanEmulator writes "The NY Times reports on how the Hollywood summer-movie business model is being applied to tech products: 'Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.' New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release. What if the TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, or even Google Wave had had more time on the market? Is this blockbuster-or-bust model a good thing for consumers, or for the industry in general?"
It's an investment strategy (Score:5, Informative)
I knew a guy who started .com companies like popcorn. His business plan was the same for all of them: be successful enough until someone bigger buys you out. His goal was to work for a year at trying to get a thing going, then sell it for a couple million dollars for that short duration that it would be hot. Most of these things were very transient. They were unknown a month ago, on the rise a week ago, popular today, and by next month they probably wouldn't even be a memory.
I think these big companies learned their lessons. They tried over and over to pump money into these little concepts that never had longevity as a part of their plans. They bled red ink.
So if they don't see that initial wave, they're cutting the bleeding off now before they pump additional useless money into a concept that never will make it. It makes financial sense.
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Either I don't understand you, or that doesn't make any sense.
Companies cut off product that don't have immediate success because products that have immediate success tend to have no longevity?
Re:It's an investment strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies deduce from this that future value [of a product] is worth nothing.
So why do they keep pushing for ever-longer terms for the copyright in a product if the value of that copyright is nothing?
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That's easy - in case someone else actually does make it into something useful and long-lived. Nobody wanted that generic photo of Obama as candidate until some guy ran it through a photoshop filter, slathering it in red and blue colors... all the sudden it became a hot property. The original photographer, now seeing that there's a chance to make some dosh off of his work, immediately launched a lawsuit.
That said, I think you're conflating creative products (movies, songs, books, etc) with physical products
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That's easy - in case someone else actually does make it into something useful and long-lived.
Except I've seen that some companies are often more willing to decline a given use entirely than to offer a licensing arrangement.
I think you're conflating creative products (movies, songs, books, etc) with physical products, which generally do not have a copyright.
Creative products are often sold fixed in a physical product (DVD, CD, printed book, etc).
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You wanted to profit off of other people's games and were then upset that they wouldn't let you--or rather, you were unhappy with the terms under which they would permit it. So, why not sell it without games or with some FOSS games instead?
I hope you hadn't invested much in developing it, considering you hinged its success entirely on what third parties would charge for the games you wanted to include.
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I guess you didn't "get it," either. :)
You don't own the rights to those games. They do. They get to set the price, and by asking for an exorbitant sum, it's just their way of telling you, "Fuck off, we're not interested."
They have no incentive to license an old game at a cheap price to a hobby product, when they're better served holding onto that property so it can be sold en masse for millions of dollars with a bunch of other properties. They're thinking big, you were thinking small.
Did they miss out on s
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Of course they not really "own" the game they have a "copyright" on it. "copyright" that was intended to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", so that IN THE END the product that is created winds up in the thing we call "culture".
If all the Grimms fairy tails had still be copyrighted, and the Grimms descendants hat wanted Disney to pay exorbitant licensing fees, what movies would Disney have made?
Nowadays most stuff that gets created just vanishes into never-to-be-seen-again copyright black
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One teeny weeny problem. It can't be "sold en masse for millions of dollars yada yada", because it isn't worth anything close to that.
No. They were thinking greedy, he was thinking realistic, and you think you're a lot smarter than you are.
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Isn't that the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves? Ali Baba finds the thieves cave, and a reasonable amount of their loot. His brother comes in, and takes so much loot that the thieves are able to catch and slaughter him. The moral - if you try to make out like a bandit, you might get your ass handed to you.
The problem with the publishers is, they think their baby worth more than any reasonable market value.
People who kill tech products are often making the same mistake - they overcapitalize (because thei
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So? The point was, the project couldn't go forward unless it at least broke even, and from the start it was destined to be a net loser because of licensing.
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You can of course prove it so, instead of merely trolling?
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Companies deduce from this that future value [of a product] is worth nothing.
So why do they keep pushing for ever-longer terms for the copyright in a product if the value of that copyright is nothing?
Because the copyright is more valuable than the product itself. No-one will buy the product, but the copyright prevents anyone else from doing it either.
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Well I was somewhat referencing the Hitchhiker's Guide radioplays, but they are a tad obscure...
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[citation required]
Counter-citation [ssrn.com]
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Which is only the case if you've got incompetent MBAs running the place. But I repeat myself, only an MBA would think that way, which is why if I ever own a company I'm not going to be hiring any of those incompetent jack asses to help manage the place.
Tech products are a bit tricky because often times they're completely useless if they don't hit critical mass, cue cat anybody? However, those sorts of products are generally easily spotted, for things that don't depend upon having a large install base to fun
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Ha, I remember back in 2000, before the first internet bubble burst, Leo Laporte was talking about Dialpad [wikipedia.org] on Screensavers. When he explained how it gave long distance calling away for free, Patrick Norton asked him how they make money. Laporte laughed and said "Oh, nothing on the internet actually makes *real* money." That pretty much sums up the first internet bubble in my memory. You make your millions from investors and your IPO, then worry about the actual business model later.
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It's also the second one except that investors know how to cash in (advertising). Still, the creators aren't thinking in terms of real money though, just cool ideas that attract a userbase. The money should sort itself out if there is a userbase that is significant.
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And at some point it's going to hurt folks with a real idea. I remember being burned by iwantsandy, I can understand needing to find revenue sources to pay for the cost of providing the service, but not giving the community a chance to pay or even giving any indication that he was about to fold operations was damaging to future attempts at doing that sort of thing. What's worse is that at the time of notice there wasn't an export utility nor were there any promises of one until folks raised a stink about it
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Back to physical products: quick death not so sure. Processes to build them could be used elsewhere and c
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it's throwing 1 billllliiiiiooon dollars into something that was done with couple of million a decade ago. you start going through the numbers in excel and realize you've been had and you paid many billions for linux with sdl.
add to that a pre-built support organization, that you built needed you it or not because it was in the manual, also having acquired a very, very expensive organization to go with that linux with sdl and couple of default apps. that's what makes sleeper hits impossible, hard to justify
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Investment strategy?
Sounds to me more of an investment trap. i.e. you try and blow things out of proportion to try and gain more money until it's time to run off with the cash.
Good things start from evolving from small beginnings as a good basic idea, that's the true start of great things.
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I think may be pandering to the stock market, as the modeling neoclassical economists apply there assumes that high risk equals high returns. Except that their models are about as real as D&D is medieval...
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But the article is not about concepts or classes of products, it is about individual products. The people who said those things about the early automobiles were correct - no matter how many years those particular cars stayed on the market, no-one was going to buy them. People came out with DIFFERENT products that addressed those issues, then the idea caught on.
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No, but some "idiotic schemes" will succeed, even if the vast majority don't. Look at the personal computer itself. In the first hobbyist, non-kit computers came out in the mid seventies, and various other hobbyists worked on their own over the years. Xerox got interested but not enough to release a finished product, and Apple, IBM, and Microsoft all got involved. IBM bowed out, Apple almost died several times, and Micr
Fishing. (Score:2)
When you go fishing, you don't expect to catch 'em all. So what, and what is this silly article doing on Slashdot?
The more options proffered, the more choice consumers can select from, and the more failed products those who like pottering with such things can exploit.
No problem.
Interoperability effects (Score:2)
Pokemon (Score:3)
As someone from the pokemon generation, I actually do expect to catch 'em all.
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Well, since you seem to want a fishing analogy, not many anglers just drop the lure into the water and reel in if there's no immediate hit. (Discounting working a lure that needs to be reeled in just to play it. I'm thinking like fly fishers or maybe good ol' fashion bobber and sinker fishing.)
Anyway, some of these product introductions is like making one cast and then giving up on the entire pond after 15 seconds.
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They would if it cost them $1.5m a minute. (Microsoft, HP etc.) Of course if it's only costing you $10 an hour, then you can afford to relax. (Small startups.)
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> Anyway, some of these product introductions is like making one cast
> and then giving up on the entire pond after 15 seconds.
If the guy in the boat next to you is using what looks like the same line, lure, bait, and boat and is pulling in 309 fish per second, it not actually be the dumbest strategy.
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Conceding a market is a rational response, assuming the market's already dominated pretty well. The smart time to do it is before introducing a product.
Only the damnest fool of a fisherman dips a line in a lake that's already being strip-fished by half a dozen commercial fishing ships. Don't even get out of the car. Find another pool.
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you got it wrong - this leads to _LESS_ consumer choice. the products are on the market for a short while and if you're not buying in that while then you can't buy it ever. want a nice clamshell linux pda? should have bought when sharp was selling them.
wanted a newton style pda in 2003? sorry no go.
want a really good force feedback joystick? well fuck, ms made them in late '90s - now they'll sell you a xbox pad.
want a pepperpad? better be ready to hunt ebay or some such and have lot's of luck. and still, th
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Sounds like the same geniuses that run Fox.
a good thing for, banks... (Score:2)
The blockbuster-or-bust model is a good thing for banks, but a catastrophy for the producing tech industry in general.
Product cycles have become too short for companies to financial absorb the eventual yet short-lived dips in sales.
Companies should only be required to report per 12 months.
Wall Street should not be allowed to do more than 6 transactions per company and 24h.
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That's a little extreme. Do you mean no more than 6 transactions per day per buyer per stock?
I'd be happy with just introducing a random delay of 1-10 seconds into every transaction.
the good of the few (Score:2)
The only people this is good for are the folks who swept into Best Buy and bought up a bunch of $99 Touchpads to sell for $250 on eBay.
Depends (Score:2)
If there was a multi-multi-million dollar ad campaign and there's no interest, you at least need to regroup.
Winners never quit and quitters never win, but if you neither quit nor win you are just a fool.
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an ad campaign is no substitute for careful and/or intelligent pricing. most pad vendors are just being pricing idiots - that was clearly HP's problem.
Depends on the brand... (Score:2)
This is really a marketing decision based on the strength of the brand of the company offering the product.
A small company without a well-known brand may be more likely to keep a losing product alive (assuming it has other revenue streams) because there is no master brand to damage.
However, a "big name" company like Apple, HP or Microsoft can't afford to have losers in their portfolio because those technologies hurt the master brand. So...they yank badly received tech quickly. This happens in plenty of ot
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Either by creating one de novo, or by using an aquisition's brand(the way HP uses 'Compaq' as a codeword for 'cheap consumer shit', while the decent stuff is "HP" or "HP-Compaq", depending on the product's history), products could be tried and eventually absorbed into the mothership if sufficiently successful, kept under the "farm brand" if unexc
Products need more time.... (Score:3)
48-49 days does NOT make a developer community. The Kin was an exception as there was no development community but HP did WebOS no favors. People aren't going to buy the damn thing if they can't get or program apps. This all started when Palm was REALLY LATE with the SDK. HP did it no favors, but it was right on the cusp of something that could have been cool.
Leo Apotheker was and IS the WRONG person to lead HP. HP hasn't ever been about the high end servers for years. Sure, people bough Superdomes but IBM had far eclipsed HP in the amount of servers it sold. Sun did too (but still failed). Leo is going down the wrong path. HP made great calculators, printers and computers and was KNOWN for them. They made servers too but when was the last time you heard them talk about that? They had HPUX and Tru64. Did nothing with either.
This is a sad sad road that HP went down and it might ultimately kill HP.
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An excellent way to ensure poor sales (Score:3)
New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release
So now people will think: I'm not going to buy this new product in case they pull it, and I can't get support any more - or a software update - or a bug-fix.
Once this becomes the established pattern, everyone will defer their purchases until at least version 2 (as most wise buyers do these days, anyway) just to see if the product has got a future. If products get pulled because nobody buys them - because they're all waiting to see if anyone *else* buys it, then the whole industry is in a downward spiral. The only way out would be to start applying serious bribes to reviewrs, if that doesn't already happen.
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on the phone side they have consistently supported phones for 3 or more years
Though they were still selling the iphone 3g well into 2010 - only to "desupport" it when ios 4.3 came out less than a year later. So the trick seems to be: choose products that look like success and THEN buy them ASAP, as they can have a very, very short supported life if you leave it too long.
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There's a similar pattern that plays out in the comics industry. Readers are reluctant to try a new series (meaning genuinely new series, not just another new title starring the X-Men or Batman) because they aren't sure whether it'll last long enough to tell the story the writer is setting out to tell. So they wait, perhaps for a collected edition of the first several monthlies into a paperback, which indicates that the publisher is committed to it. But because they're not buying the monthlies, the sales
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Of course, if each monthly actually told a useful and interesting story itself, that worked together to form a bigger story arc, that problem just wouldn't exist... If you're going to serialize something, each episode needs to be able to stand-alone - this applies in many other industries, so why should comics be any different? If something needs all n portions to be readable, why not release them all together?
Bad products (Score:3)
The problem with the examples given (TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, and Google Wave) is that they were ultimately not great products. Not only should they have been yanked, but they really shouldn't have been offered in the first place. I say that not having actually used the TouchPad, but having had experience with WebOS and being generally unimpressed.
And... well... it's not necessarily so much that they're bad products, but that they're marketed poorly. Most of you will misunderstand and think that I mean that they weren't advertised well, but marketing is a different thing. A large part of marketing is determining that there is a market, determining what that market wants/needs, and then building/adjusting a product to meet those wants/needs. None of that was done very well with any of these products.
The Kin, for example, was a semi-smart phone released into a world where people generally either want smartphones or they want dumb-phones, and even the people who want dumb-phones are dying out. Since the smart phones have been so successful, there is a big demand and development community for smartphone apps, and there's a limit to how many incompatible platforms are going to be supported. As a result, the whole world is being divided into iOS and Android, and if you want to compete, you have to offer something compelling enough to displace one of the two big guys. The TouchPad suffered from the same thing: it was developed for a market that didn't exist. The world is all Android and iOS, and there isn't really a market for a 3rd platform at the same price point with no compelling advantages.
Google Wave had a different problem: it never defined what problem it was trying to solve. Was it a collaborative document editor, a replacement for email, or a weird IM client? I used Google Wave for several months, and I still don't know. They also launched a communications platform on an invite-only basis, which meant that you didn't have anyone to communicate with. By the time they had a wide release, everyone had already given up.
In each case, I wouldn't say it's an issue of the developer/manufacturer giving up too soon. The problem is that they didn't give up soon enough.
The touchpad is actually a decent product (Score:2)
I haven't used the others, but I bought a Touchpad for $99. It's fine. A $7 app plays all the downloaded TV shows I have, the built-in browser views all the websites I tried without any problems, including embedded flash video, a kindle app is free, a facebook app is free, there's a decent free weather app, it's got Angry Birds, and a developer mode is easy to enable which gives access to the homebrew apps and custom kernels.
Sure there are minor feature additions that would be nice, but on the whole it's
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I wouldn't pay full price for it, but then I wouldn't pay full price for the iPad or Transformer either.
Well but that's kind of my point when I said they weren't necessarily "bad products" but they were products without a market. Obviously there's a market for $500 iPads because Apple is selling them at a healthy pace, but you aren't part of that market. You're also not part of the $500 TouchPad market, and you're not alone-- there is no market for $500 TouchPads. Your market-- the "I want a $500 tablet for $100" market-- obviously exists, but there's no business model for that unless you're subsidizing it
These are bad examples (Score:2)
The trouble here is that some of these are bad examples. The Kin wasn't a bad idea, when it was first ready for release. It's the 18 month delay to retool it to run on Windows that actually killed the product. Released on time with what they had initially? Who knows.
The TouchPad was released at the same price as the iPad but isn't as good. Who thought that would work?
Pleanty of products still get time to mature. Android itself wasn't a massive success day 1, but has gained traction steadily and is huge now.
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The Kin was not a good idea. It was what a sales guy thought people wanted to do with the net. As opposed to a device that lets people do what they want to do. It was like watching your parents try to be cool and modern. Just...painful.
However the Kin was cute.
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Electric cars were very popular in the 1920s when diesel cars had only recently been invented, were very noisy, smelly and difficult to start, and their main competitor the steam car took about 20 minutes for the boiler to heat up and had a similar range to electric. A lot of people don't realise that electric cars were invented about 50 years before internal combustion engine cars.
Elecrtric trains are pretty popular and generally outperform diesel models because they can get their electricity directly fro
Depends... (Score:2)
By 'tightly-coupled' I mean an(admittedly rough) measure of how tightly integrated the product is to ancillary products, services, drivers, support, etc.
Something like, say, the Dell "Inspiron 15 (N5040)" would be 'loosely-coupled'. Other than BIOS updates, which can only be Dell-provided, virtually all related software and likely services would be unaffected by its discontinuation: You can still trivially
Fail Fast (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Example of products that where not smash hits and are still moving forward.
1. Bing. It is still has a small market share but Microsoft keeps putting resources into it and it is growing.
2. XBox. The first XBox didn't make a profit but the 360 looks like it finally has.
3. Windows Phone 7 "I don't think this is ever going to be more than a poor 3rd place myself but they are till pushing it".
4. Android. Remember the G1. It didn't sell that well and was only on TMobile in the US.
5. PS3 After the mad launch rush it sales just slowed. The Wii was the big hit and the 360 was out first and sold well. Sales of the PS3 are still improving even now.
Of the other products mentioned well let's take a look at them
The Kin. It wasn't WP7 it had no real apps, it was tied to an expensive data plan. Yes it stank out of the box. Microsoft really did a good job killing Danger after they spend a pile of money to buy them.
Google Wave. I tried to find a use for the tech but I just couldn't It was kind of neat but didn't have a good use case for a lot of people.
Touchpad. This one was murdered in it's crib. HP bought Palm and then the CEO was kicked out in a scandal. His replacement had no interest in the consumer market. Palm had three products in the works and those where the Pre III, the TouchPad, and the Veer. HP dragged their feet on those and took a year to get them out the door! What??? WebOS is actually are really good OS but HP again shipped it on old hardware! Of course the new CEO is also going to spin of the PC division as well. Of course you have to love HP not wanting to risk the long term investment in Palm so instead they took a 12 billon dollar stock hit.
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The Touchpad won't. The card ui is nice but I haven't found much else innovative about it so far. HP failed to generate hype around it, they failed to generate much of dev community and they failed to put out hardware as good as the ipad and priced it at the same amount. At $200 dollars less than the ipad it would have been a compelling proposition because I could take the money and pop it into apps and accessories.
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The card UI is more than nice.
Lets' face it as far has hardware goes a tablet leaves little to no room for innovation. Every one knows the specs that must be in a tablet.
1. An ARM CPU.
2. Mulitouch with a touch screen.
3. Some flash and some ram.
4. a battery.
5. Wifi.
6. A front facing camera.
If you are going to add mobile support it will add a cell radio+gps.
About the only option will be microSD and or a camera on back. As I said the HP failure with Palm was caused by a lack of any vision or passion for the ma
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And the three examples that they give of killing product where?
Kin which had the same support as 1,2,3
Wave "Google"
Touchpad "HP"
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Thing is that the two of the three examples given where not good products.
The Kin was just dumb. It was late and didn't fit in with Microsoft's current line up.
Wave was just odd at best.
I think a better article would be about what happens when a company looses it's identity and passion.
I think both HP and Nokia are good examples of this.
HP isn't HP anymore the latest CEO is trying to turn it into SAP. Nokia is becoming Microsoft's phone company.
That is why HP didn't have the stomach to go head to head with
Different market means different expectations (Score:2)
Movie blockbusters are a human stampede, and occur for ephemeral reasons -- people are going to see a movie, the question is which one, and the answer is mostly the one they can talk about with others.
Choosing assets such as communicating and computing machinery is a much larger investment with much longer usage/payoff period. There is going to be more research, and a longerinitial adoption period. The Wii and especially Android are examples.
Demanding instant success (Wall$t HF junkies) is the same as dema
Marketing Rules at All Levels ... (Score:2)
Just recently talked to a person who is related to the consumer electronics business (website java) who confirmed that for instance TV-sets have to be updated each half year (in Europe), otherwise 'shareholder-value' would be in danger because negative ratings ('not able to innovate') were the consequence of a more sensible product cycling.
CC.
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It's almost like cars in America having to change the grille and cupholders every year so they can claim it's a new model.
It depends on why they failed. (Score:2)
If it's unique and new and people aren't quite capable of justifying it yet, it'll take off slowly. Just look at the early days of DVR.
If it's a "me too attempt" at competing with something out there using a similar product - it becomes quickly apparent whether you've got what it takes to "stay in the game" (Android) or you don't (WebOS, Blackberry PlayBook). If upon release your product simply sucks and gets killed by reviewers for being incomplete - then it deserves to die. This was the case for the To
touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos (Score:4, Interesting)
The touchpad was simply overpriced. If HP had sold it for, say $150 for 16GB, and $200 for 32GB, it may have sold better to begin with. The crazy rate that everyone sold out of all stock means that there are now a whole lot of WebOS tablets in people's hands now. App developers saw a huge spike in downloads after the sale. Getting WebOS out there, people will see what it is like and perhaps not settle for the inferior interfaces of Android and iOS.
HP's own tablet making may be dead. WebOS isn't quite done yet. Wouldn't it be cool if Dell got into the tablet business and licensed WebOS for them...
Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos (Score:5, Interesting)
No it was priced right according to iSuppli who did the teardown. If HP sold it at $150 there would have been a loss on each device sold.
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx [isuppli.com]
They probably COULD have saved money somewhere, but they already chintzed on the plastic in the back.
The real problem is there were no apps. There was no real push by Palm OR HP on gaining developers. At least not one like there should have been. Plus the SDK was REALLY late. By that time, Palm was already dead in the water, HP picked them up and did NOTHING with them.
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HP did not really fail so much as the heart of the company was not invested in it. They ha
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Except that Apple do no such thing (outside of the paying bloggers part, but sadly there is no way to prove that).
Instead they keep deathly quiet, but ever so often there is a "leak" so some "rumor"-page that goes "Product X may show up in time for some holiday or other and may have feature Y!!!".
The ads only show up when a product is good and ready to be sold, after Apple have invited the press faithfuls and Jobs have delivered his superlative-soaked presentation.
Sometimes i wonder if the "leaks" are cover
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PADS are WAY OVERPRICED... (Score:2)
iSupply is wacked. The price would be less than $100.00 based on components in lots of 1000.
The prices listed in the BOM look like off-the-shelf component costs.
For example, here's the TOTAL comsumer cost for a new 27' TV...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001431&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Monitors+-+LCD+Flat+Panel-_-SAMSUNG-_-24001431
There is no way a tablet is going to be priced MORE than the above monitor.
Or how about this TOTAL consumer part...
http://www.newe
Why are you posting about this on Slashdot? (Score:2)
Why are you posting about this on Slashdot when you could be out making your fortune. Go get yourself an Android license and start cranking out $150 tablets. You're going to make a killing!
Well, why are you still here?
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Nooooo. And besides, it's a doomed long term strategy.
iSuppli figured HP spent a little over $300 on just material costs. Figure the other cost of manufacture ad shipping bring it to $350 a unit. At $150 sale price they would have planned to take a 50 million dollar loss just on their initial 250,000 units. And god help them if it did become popular. The iPad has sold 30m units. For the Touchpad to have matched that HP would have lost 6 Billion dollars. 6 Billion just to get their foot in the door!
And then
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the manufacturing cost for any 10" capacitative tablet is about $300 - if HP had chosen to sell at $150, it would have been a loss-leader. that's still an intelligent strategy, though obviously only as _part_ of a plan.
HP, like other tablet vendors, seems to have seen Apple making money and said "we want some of that". so they produced a more-or-less comparable tablet and blithely assumed that they could sell it at Apple prices. but regardless of Apps, or whether HP's product was technically at par, we a
And the underappreciated 3DS (Score:2)
It's not the time on market that's the problem (Score:2)
The problem is they're trying to imitate an already established or hot product. Imitating is fine if you can keep the price well below the 'original' product or you make massive innovations to it. Microsoft Kin and HP TouchPad were not only knockoffs, they were bad knockoffs with inferior UI, software and performance and cost as much as the original.
The Android model has fared better because it's going on much cheaper phones and a lot larger choice of phones (sometimes even better phones) than the iPhone an
How much shelf space does a product take up? (Score:2)
A movie is taking up very expensive real estate. It requires a large screening room, with several employees to manage it. Further, the movie is selling not just itself, but the snacks that go along with it. (And that's actually most of where the theater makes its profit; it's showing the movie nearly at cost.)
A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
In other words... these are apples and oranges.
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A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
A tech product can moulder on a virtual shelf, but not on a physical shelf. Every foot of space in a brick and mortar store is expected to bring in revenue. If a product is taking up 10 feet of shelf and not selling, the retailer will fill those 10 feet of shelving with something that will sell.
This market ruins it for me (Score:2)
This keeps me in Windows 7 laptops and netbooks because a 1.5 year lifespan on a $600 product is nuts, in my opinion. With windows
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like tv shows (Score:2)
Kind of like the tv shows. Nowhere Man lasted only 1 season, years ago, but that was still 22 episodes. There are shows today that get canceled after 3 episodes. Perhaps they should be left out there a little longer to give them a chance to build public interest. I see this in a lot of things, tech, tv, movies, for example.
Not if support ends as well (Score:2)
The TouchPad may be a and example (Score:2)
HP decided they couldn't compete at manufacturing a tablet so they killed it. WebOS still exists and may resurface as a licensed OS on 3rd party tablets from companies who know a bit about manufacturing.
HP appears to have decided that, in most cases, manufacturing technology products is a losing proposition and appears to have decided to remake itself as a software / IT consulting firm. It remains to be seen if they are successful or just become another company that gets bought out and disappears.
The singularity is coming (Score:2)
This makes no sense. (Score:2)
It makes sense to pull a movie that's not making money because the exhibitor can make more money by filling that theater with another movie. And the investment in a movie's release ends at its release. Even if you do pull it from theaters you have secondary markets in TV, video, and on-demand services. You only need to provide one copy and many people can consume it.
With a manufactured product you have a large productive system built to make only that product, and shutting it down before giving its produ
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No loss unless you cling to your company name. For each new product, creating a new shell company is trivial.
All is branding.
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Sony and all its line of failures would like to disagree with you.
DAT, MiniDisc and Betamax come to mind. While they never really caught in the mainstream market, some gained some sort of popularity in "niche" markets. DAT is the interesting example: it was developed to replace the Cassette but was never popular in home environments, but it found a loyal user base in the semi-pro (and
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Minidisc had some popularity in Europe but it was never really that big. Just bad timing, I guess, since in 1999 the Diamond Rio was out and by next year Napster was the shit. If it wasn't for MP3, maybe MD would have been the alternative.
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You sure about that? Which Apple product was discontinued without support after only one month?
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Seriously. Crap is crap.
Sometimes it takes the product being on the market, and getting real feedback, before the CEO/company says whoops, and pulls it. The salesguys always lie.
And it feels like companies release a lot more crap these days than they used to. Hence more failures.
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When a product fails because "consumers don't know it exists", it simply means it wasn't launched properly. You can't make money without spending money, and today's marketplace is very expensive to get into. That means you need to buy TV ads, billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, web ads, and more and more ads to properly launch a product. You also have to line up the "spokesman" type of folks that will represent the product to the public - they aren't going to talk about it on G4 TV unless
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