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.

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.

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.

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

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