Say Goodbye To The Netpliance i-opener

HiyaPower writes "Netpliance announced that they have thrown in the towel and will no longer produce their internet appliance. This follows the failure of web appliances by Virgin, and a number of others. It looks like even grandma wants a good isp when she logs on the net and that bundling cute hardware with inferior service just doesn't cut the mustard. This will be a sad note to all of those who have yet to buy the unit that cost $400 to produce for a fraction of that amount. Get'm while you can, cuz they don't make'm no more..." CEO John McHale says in that announcement: "We plan to reposition Netpliance from a direct consumer Internet appliance service provider to an enabling infrastructure and managed services company." Perhaps there will be some closeouts? jensend sent in this C|Net coverage as well.

Comments

Too bad- my great aunt loves hers

[RebornData]

She's completely computer-illiterate, and she has been using an I-Opener for e-mail pretty successfully. She's lost most of her hearing, so it's really made it possible for her to communicate with family more regularly and easily than she could on the phone. A PC is waaay too complicated for her- she learned to learn by rote, and the fact that I could fit click-by-click instructions for doing I-Opener e-mail on one side of a piece of paper is the only reason she uses it successfully.

I think the lesson here is that the market for peripherals for the permanently computer illiterate is not big enough to sustain a company like I-Opener. Too bad, because there aren't a lot of good alternatives for them.

No wonder! Shoulda died sooner.

[Vegeta99]

Think about it. I go to CNN.com and see "Video Coverage!". I click on it in an i-Opener or any netpliance. I get a cryptic error message like "Unknown file type: .rm", and I don't know what it means! It's not working. Let's take it back, it doesn't do what I told it to.
They don't work as good as PCs. They don't do what they should be able to.

Re:Buzzword alert!

[bughunter]

If my BS filter is working properly, I think this means that they want to change into an upstream service provider for businesses and small ISPs, and provide unspecified information services for corporate customers (you know, email, database servers, file servers, etc...).

The CNET article also says that they are going to license the I-Opener to AT&T and continue to provide the service, probably one layer removed from the consumer.

From CNET: Netpliance said it is forming a venture with AT&T's WorldNet service to jointly offer a version of the I-opener, with Netpliance providing infrastructure and helping to manage the service. The $299 units, similar to the I-opener, will go on sale after Thanksgiving on QVC, the television shopping network. Monthly service for the I-opener will be priced at $21.95.

Re:Buzzword alert!

[technos]

Translation:

We're firing people, `cuz this "let's sell hardware cheap to Joe Schmoo so we can rape him on service charges" thing we've been doing is making us hemorrage money like you wouldn't believe. Instead, we're gonna try the "let's sell hardware cheap to Joe Q. Business so we can rape him on service charges". Mabye we'll offer to add the company logo to the I-Opener for `em. Never know, might work. Gotta do something, `cuz otherwise the buzzards are gonna eat us inside of six months.

Re:A Sad Day

[ewhac]

But all this ended because a few thought the rules didn't apply to them.

Nice attempt at mis-direction. Yes, you're correct: The i-Opener is going away because a few people thought the rules didn't apply to them. The few people involved are Netpliance management. The rules they thought didn't apply to them are:

• Items purchased in a retail venue become the purchaser's property, to do with as they please.
  So-called license "agreements" are nothing of the kind. They are an invalid form of contract, and a massively unethical business practice. As a person may buy a washing machine from Sears and use it as part of a sculpture (contrary to the intentions of the manufacturer), so may they also buy a computer at Best Buy and use it in any manner they wish.
• The razor/razor blade model only works when the cost of the razor is epsilon compared to the profit margin on blades.
  What is the cost of a typical razor? What is the cost of a typical pack of razor blades? The reality is that the cost of the razor will usually be recovered after the sale of three or four (at most) packs of blades. Netpliance's cost differential was way out of whack. When you're looking at two to three years of uninterrupted service revenue to recover the cost of one unit, you've got a big imbalance.
• When confronted with a choice between a single-purpose device for $X, and an expandable general purpose device for $(1.3 * X), more consumers will choose the general-purpose device.
  Full-on PCs are dirt cheap. You can get a nicely capable PC for about $700 these days. You're not locked in to any ISP. You're not locked in to any particular browser (though Micros~1 makes it hard for you to switch). You can play real games, not cheeseball Java- and Flash-based rot. And your data is your data. If the ISP goes down, you can still compose email and do other things. The cost/benefit ratio of an Internet Appliance just doesn't measure up to a full PC.

Netpliance thought these rules didn't apply to them. They were wrong. Any failure of their business can be laid squarely at the door of Netpliance's management. The Open Source and hacking communities had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Schwab

Re:Im not surprised...

[bughunter]

I don't think "net devices" are going to be anything more than a niche product until they meet the following criteria:

• Portabiltity. They need to be as portable as a book or a newspaper. Microsoft's recently announced product is a good example.
• Peer connectivity. This has already been done with PDAs and handhelds, and in a portable net device, it will be expected. Transparent Connectivity. The network connection needs to be totally transparent. Buy device, enter name and password, and you're on. There are many hypothetical ways to make this work, but no practical ways yet. (You still have to buy the device, arrange for a seperate network service for it, and then wait for it to activate, that's not going to fly!)
• Reliability. It needs to be as reliable as a book or a newspaper as well. OK... that's impossible. But it has to be close.
• Storage. It can't be just another dumb terminal like a cellphone. It has to have some provision to store and upgrade the user's choice of applications, and reference data.
• Utility. The reason PDAs and Cellphones have become so popular is because they fill a necessary useful purpose. So far, browsing the web and checking email isn't a necessary useful purpose in many peoples' lives (slashdotters excepted). And until it does, net devices won't take off.

There are too many companies trying to force the next "killer app" or "insanely great thing" via marketing instead of by using old-fashioned innovation. And their corpses are beginning to pile up...

(And ironically, it's actually cheaper and easier to use innovation. Of course, that assumes one possesses creativity and insight...)

Re:Anybody Got A Line?

[Tackhead]

> its limited cpu and non-TFT screen made for a boring user experience.

The passive-matrix screen and 800x600 resolution are something that can't be fixed, but any IO can be hacked with a bit of solder to run a K6-III-333 at speeds up to 450 MHz.

There are serious heat and power supply limits at 450, but even a very conservative clocking of a K6-III-333 underclocked to 200 MHz is about a 2:1 performance boost over the original WinChip 200. Cost of the chip is $30 at Fry's (for those lucky enough to live near a Fry's.)

Hey, it plays MP3s and runs my GPS mapware. I'm happy, even if the GPSware is a Windoze app.

It's never gonna replace your desktop, and for the amount of time/money you'll put into it, you're better off buying a used laptop on EBay. But I had a hell of a lot more fun building my own line-out, headphone jack, second serial port, VGA-out connector, IDE connectors, hard drive mounts, cooling fans, and doing core voltage / CPU-upgrade mods with a soldering iron and a prayer than I ever woulda had with a used laptop.

Like I said in my other post - my thanks to NPLI for the cool hardware. I learned a lot and had a ball doing it.

Odd...

[SquadBoy]

The website is still up and selling them. It just looks like they will not produce them anymore read the article they are going to leave the service up and running and continue full support. It looks like they are just scaling back on it so the answer is no you will not be able to get one without having to sign up for the service in the near future. But for $200 for a rebuilt one it is still pretty tempting.

Im not surprised...

[Mr. Flibble]

I would never want a "net device", but I am a geek. I own 8 PC's and I administer many more at work. Because I am a geek people always ask me what kind of computer they should buy, I always give them some idea of what they need.

You can see where this is going...

People who know nothing about the systems ask the people who do know what to buy... How often would you imagine that the word-of-mouth from geeks is praiseworthy over a net device? I would say almost never.

On the bright side (for geeks) there are cheap "PC's" around to hack on. I am trying to get a WebSurfer from Virgin to build a dedicated Linux MP3 player for my car. (The WebSurfer has a disk on a chip WOOO! Talk about fast boots!)

Buzzword alert!

[Stiletto]

CEO John McHale says in that announcement: "We plan to reposition Netpliance from a direct consumer Internet appliance service provider to an enabling infrastructure and managed services company."

When their CEO can't even get past the "buzzword phase" how does Netpliance expect to even dream of coming up with a useful product?

Can anyone even decipher what the above quote even means???

I actually expected this sooner, it's a good move

[kalinh]

My impression of NPLI from their press releases, and from having the chance to talk to its executives has always been that the i-opener hardware was more of a way of getting their market established, building a recognizable brand and then, as soon as possible, farming their services out to other providers as an internet company.

The fact that they want to stop their cash bleed on the hardware should have been very apparant to anyone with eyes when they raised the price of the i-opener back up to $399 instead of the $99 that they had offered for some time. Anyone with a basic grip on economics should have known that it was going to happen way before that.

Basically they are a software company that everyone kept treating like an appliance company. In a July interview on Raging Bull president Kent Savage had to go to pains to get this point across,

Cyber: But isn't a large part of Netpliance's premise to sell that hardware, the I-opener?

Savage: No, not at all. We did that because we had to. We're a market maker and a first mover, and we had to innovate in order to reach this market.

It's really predictable and sad the way that the geek community has so heavily focused on the device. Unfortunately, it was really nothing too special technology-wise and the interesting things that NPLI was up to was its interface and "OS-agnostic" software package. Also it's client-server infrastructure kind of resurrected 'push' in a market and environment where it almost starts to make sense.

The "i-opener experience" is not nearly as stupid as it sounds, if you step outside of your "master of the source" persona and pretend you are on the other-side of the digital divide for a second. Sure, I prefer to navigate the net with Enlightenment as my interface of choice, but I doubt most of the flashing-12:00-on-the-VCR crowd would. The i-opener interface is just clean and as simple and dumbed-down as you can get, which is great for the market they were targetting.

They signed major strategic relations with big cable companies a long time ago (check the press releases on their web site), and their client software is well suited to be rolled out as an adjunct to set-top boxes and appliance offerings from telcos like At&T. It's curious what difficulties they might be going through negotiating "managed services" contracts with these companies because if I was running the company I would have made this shift in business plans a long long time ago. However you feel about it, they'll probably be around for a while yet, especially if they can convince US West or AT&T subsidize the hardware side of things instead of blowing all their IPO capital on it.

Kalin

Metamuscle - Building better bodies through hypertext. Slashdot for bodybuilders.

Netpliance: Told Ya

[hanway]

I would like to take this opportunity to fling a big "ha, ha, told ya" in Netpliance's direction. I posted this in the Slashdot discussion Meeting With Netpliance this past April 11:

Here's what I'd tell Netpliance: Please go ahead with whatever onerous changes in terms of service you need to make a buck, but leave the hardware hackable, because in a year or so when you're out of business we'll still be around to make some use of used and surplus i-openers, otherwise they'll all end up in landfills all too soon.

EBay auction item: 27,000 new-in-box IOs

[Tackhead]

Hey, it'll make Netpliance more than $99 per unit in revenue, right? ;-)

More seriously - my condolences to the employees and investors - and gratitude for the cool hardware.

Before folks start screaming that 3v17 h@x0rZ killed NPLI, judging from their revenue figures and number of units sold, I'd bet that the "hackers" snagged about 5000 units, costing about $1.5M over the history of the company - a drop in the bucket against the $10M+ marketing and G&A expenses for the most recent quarter.

The way to make money off the 'net is not to sell hardware as a loss-leader, nor is it to get into the $20/month ISP business.

That's not to say anyone really knows what the way to make money is, just to say that NPLI and others (e.g. Virgin's "internet appliance" operation folded a few days ago) found out the hard way what it wasn't, and that no amount of marketing expense can change it.

well, not quite thrown in the towel

[ruiner5000]

They will be selling them again with AT&T starting after Thanksgiving. Then they will resume selling them on their own after January 31st. They just canceled their remaining contract with Quanta. I assume this means they will be going with someone else or perhaps get AT&T to assist them. Austin Tech News