The Long Tail of Hardware | Hacker News Reader

The Long Tail of Hardware

amandapeyton.com

40 pointsinmygarage6 comments

Her point 2 is interesting. It has long been to the great bafflement of Westerners why Sony's software is so bad. You will know what I mean if you ever tried to use Sonic Stage for your MP3s. And the reason is in the West we expect(ed) to have the PC as the hub into which we would plug everything to manage it. Whereas in Japan, your camera would just print directly to your printer and that was that, so in their home market Sony never had to learn to write software for PCs. Anyway, we might be seeing something similar happen here too now.

I don't think that's the whole story, given that the software that runs on their devices isn't much better...

I don't have time to find the link right now; but, if you google around a bit, you can find articles (one, I believe, from Cringely) that points out that Sony's dominance in many areas was during an era of primarily mechanical electronics. That's a very different skill set than computer hardware / software based electronics. A skill set that, presumably, Sony never fully developed.

I think hardware goes in phases. First there are 1 or 2 products that define the category. Then it explodes into 100s of competing products, all with a slightly different take. Then it matures and contracts back into a few.

Right now we are seeing diversity smart phones contracting -- I think we'll be left with iPhone and Samsung. The majority of PC makers are struggling to survive. Portable audio market was pretty much just the iPad. There is a short window when margins are high enough for lots of experimentation and lots of companies to survive.

I think the smart phone accessory market will explode for the next 2 - 4 years, a few key products will emerge and the rest will fade away. Consumers can only handle the excitement for so long before they get tired keeping up and just buy the status quo.

I think there is a vast world of difference between many different iPhone speaker companies and the evolution of the Internet of things. Hardware's long tail lives not in small run funky devices but in common cheap sensors to track our everything and in power, ease and education coming together to allow anyone to build their own devices for their own needs in a weekend DIY

I think the long tail of hardware is becoming more viable just by virtue of the fact that it is easier to presell and prepromote a product without risking a large up front order. That changes the game in a lot of ways.

I'm not sure that demand has changed so much as the changing cost going to market.

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