Why Michael Arrington Is The Real Winner In The CrunchPad Ordeal
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I don't really see any evidence to support this statement. At best it's 50/50 and at worst Mr. Arrington's reputation is possibly tipping it in FG's favor. Personally I think it's pretty obvious that a blogger/business man had little or nothing to do with the actual nuts & bolts development of the product. Entirely possible his money was involved but we don't know yet.
"If I were @arrington I’d be breathing a big sigh of relief. A $500 tablet is NOT what he envisioned."
He started at $300, then it was $400. Now it's $500. It doesn't seem while he was involved pricing was working out exactly as he had envisioned. Perhaps this disparity alone explains the true situation. FG doesn't seem to be equipped to puke out millions of CrunchPads selling for a tiny margin. They can however sell a product with a higher margin to a smaller tablet loving audience. It's a much more realistic business model for FG. Once you hit $400 another $100 really doesn't really matter that much. As Apple said the iPod Touch and iPhone took off at $199. That's the price point a mainstream audience will pay. Arrington's business model for the CrunchPad was probably a little too pie-in-the-sky for FG.
If the device fails he will claim it was a result of price point and not falling in line with what he originally envisioned.
There we have a win-win situation, kudos for Arrington getting to it so publicly.
If the logic is that he "won" because otherwise he would have lost bigger, relatively speaking, maybe, but that is some twisted logic and seems like sour grapes.
I'm going to call my plan "The Future." Since I just wrote about it online, in a comment, any time any one reference The Future, or even mention the future, and it includes some aspect of my plan I demand you credit me and attribute me as being involved. Because I wrote about the idea first.
Also, the blogosphere agrees with me about ending world hunger, having a Mars base, and the need for an alternative fuel source so I'm right. Because we all know if it's popular then it's more important than the truth and popular people are always the best judges of plausibilities in an intellectual property legal dispute where there are no legal documents.
This is why Michael Arrington won.
I was involved in the Crunchpad from day 1 and we actually built a lot of things - long before anybody else came along.
You might have a different viewpoint if you have ever had anything you built or were involved with stolen from you. It sucks.
Not just from an IP perspective, but from a 'lets ride this wave while it suits us' perspective as well.
But I don't have any more information on the matter than the author of this blog post--unless you guys sent him all the legal papers or he's the arbitrator in the dispute, then by all means I'll eat my hat--and I find his use of flawed logic, piling on to the drama, and a mention of an unannounced and unseen Apple tablet is just... lame.
Especially the part about wanting a tablet for $200. I want a pony that poops ice cream.
Edit: software / user experience design is also hard, that was probably included.
You can either wait for Google OS or use http://moblin.org/. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to pay a $200+ premium for someone to install it for me.
How thin is thin? How thin do you really need it to be?
http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook if you want to pretend that Apple makes tablets.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/ smaller screen and thicker chassis but longer battery life for $300.
Various Windows laptops, harder to find since noone wanted to pay the premium for a touchscreen.
If you want a browser-only tablet, install Chrome OS or something.
$200 still is in the land of magic ponies and unicorns though.
It's actually quite possible that Michael never raised any money, never invested anything significant into Fusion Garage, and therefore really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.
Saying that you "Worked together on an idea" and "Collaborated on a system" - is a lot different from having a contract wherein Arrington invested $500K into the project, and got a clear assignment of intellectual property.
It will be interesting to see if he files suit against fusion garage.
Meanwhile - why by JooJoo when I have to believe for $300 more you'll be able to get a MacTablet is what I'm thinking...
(Well said.)
Also there's no doubt he got played and on his own blog to boot.
The fact that anyone even covered "The JooJoo" shows that. Always Innovating Touch Book is a cheaper product that appears superior in just about every way and it never made it to the top of Techmeme. Arrington got strung along and then cut loose after he'd outlived his usefulness and that's got to p*ss him off
If they have a $500 tablet now, and are first to market... they can probably have a $300, and then $200 tablet sooner than anyone.
My point: what's most salient for how useful a processor or any piece of hardware, is to what purpose that hardware is going to be put. If the thing is just for browsing then it probably has enough. Whether just browsing fits a lot of people's use of the web is another matter. (If it's just an adjunct to another machine, why not have it map the user's Downloads directory?)
Not quite following that logic.
But you must admit that presenting "let's make it for $199" as a valuable idea is annoying. It's like those 'think outside the box' speakers that present Apple's "idea" as "Let's make a computer that isn't as big as a fridge and is cheap enough to be bought by normal people." There's an Ali G presents to Donald Trump aspect to it.
But $499.00 for a product from an unknown entity like Fusion Garage? eh. from what I've seen of them so far, they don't have Apple's flair for design. So now it's more of a stretch. They'll get some sales from gadget-happy early adopters, but it's going to take a whole lot of feel-good word-of-mouth reporting in the blogosphere before it will hit the mainstream.
Microsoft's Courier looks game changing, especially compared to their current Tablet PC offerings. Very slick looking, albeit vaporware at the moment. I'd imagine Apple would have to be just as amazing, though possibly in a different direction than the student/business note-taking market Microsoft is targeting. Microsoft seems to be in a very niched market here.