Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed, but PL had an excellent product, the flexible e-ink display, that had they sold it as a component[1] they could have funded any number of future products. Instead they felt they had the funding and runway to build the entire experience and dominate the e-reader market with a more durable, less expensive, and larger format product.

The interesting bit was that they were not wrong, if they could do all those things they could have dominated the market. But they had too much money relative to the market window. As a result they spent way too much time working through product issues that were completely unrelated to their game changing display and once full color tablet readers were a competitive threat they had too much margin pressure to recoup any of their development costs.

[1] And yes, I met with their VP of Marketing/Product Development and explained this to them when they had time to take the advice, but they did not.

I agree, they tried to do more than they should have.

A general issue I see, however, is that the real world need for flexible displays is far more limited than earlier projections suggested. If you switch to a rigid display, there is no reason to use an organic transistor back plane - that's where things start to unravel. PL were not even the first company in that space. There also were Polymervision and a couple of others.

It is quite difficult to predict exactly the road not taken, I realize that PL's demise may have been written long before they chose the path they chose. That said, I could see other markets, markets that have yet to be exploited, which they might have reached. One was the 'flimsy', a bare bones e-reader so simple it could be sold very cheaply if its display was built using roll to roll printing technology. It was the 'e-reader as printer' something that sat perhaps in a network connected cradle with the 'smarts' and you printed to the display and then could detach it and take it with you. With a flexible display you could feed in a new display like you would a sheet of paper, with either a set of contacts along one edge or the driver in the surface on which the sheet rested. Lawyers carry around literally pounds of paper for trial, putting all of those in a dozen e-readers so that you could have all the interesting pages up to read at the same time. That would be something.

The key though is cost. A slam dunk product would cost what the Boogie board does ($30) have 200dpi+ resolution and let you write on it with a simple stylus.

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