Design for the edge?

Michael Gartenberg | April 26, 2004, 09:55 AM

No argument from me Alec. BUT, it only works when you design for the edge and CAN make the shift over the to the mass markets. CD players started like this. But there's a lot of reasons that they were able to make the leap from the enthusiast to the masses. In the case of the music players, it's not about design for the edge or the masses. It's about where the sweet spot is today for folks to build and sell devices. There may be folks that need or desire 40gb players, they just don't represent the mass market. The mass market is happy with 1,000 songs and the capacities that go with that number. The proof? look how well the iPod mini is doing. It's at a capacity and price point that users want today. As for tomorrow? well, read the report!

Weblog: Alec Saunders .LOG
Source: Design for the edge

Interesting thread going on here between Gartenberg and Scoble.  You can see the latest posting hereand track it back. The Edge vs Average design problem is a constant in technology marketing.  You can generalize it very simply to a cost benefit analysis.  5 years ago, who would have considered putting 1/4 of a terabyte of media in a PC?  A few intrepid pioneers (like Rich Tong) were digitizing their entire CD collections, and running them off NT servers at home, but the rest of us considered the storage to expensive, and the benefit minimal.  Today, according to Michael Gartenberg's posting, the average customer has less than 1,000 songs in a collection, and that makes tiny players viable.  Today, everybody digitizes music.  And the audiophiles amongst us are ripping them at 320Kb/s, requiring even more storage than before.

So, would:

• home networks exist if NICs still cost $250 per machine? if wireless was still $1000 per node?
• there be 300 million cell phones in use in North America if they still cost $1000 for a basic handset?
• the internet be pervasive if high speed meant a single T1 interface costing $20,000 per month?

The edge is where innovation happens.   It's where the VC money flows, and it's where the greatest potential and greatest risk lie.  The bet you're making is that the edge case will become the general case.

[PubSub: Gartenberg]