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Hack This, Please
Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.
in implying the the customers at large wish to hack products. We (yes, I'm including myself) are a minority, though numerous.
Where the average customer can win is through the end products of hacking. Third party ring tones and games, etc for cell phones are passe now. So are "performance chips" for engine control modules. Third party hacks and add-ons for other embedded systems, like PVRs are here or on the way. In one way or another, all of these are the result of 'hacking' and have direct benefit for the non-hackers.
The Rockbox software (http://rockbox.haxx.se)
has incorporated some nifty things that the company, Archos seemed to have left out
Currently, it can:
-play movies on it's screen
-alter the playing speed of MP3s
-use bookmarks, different fonts, and more
-and just recently there are "voice fonts" where the entire menu system is read back to you. There are a decent number of blind rockbox users, and this makes it the only mp3 player they can use. Ever see a blind person use an ipod? This customization alone is something that most blind people would pay upwards of 10-20x the cost of a device to be implemented!
And with Amazon selling the 20GB USB2.0 recorders for $79 after a rebate I don't know where you can get a better deal!
-eric
The last line of the article summarizes it all with one line: "mass customization". It's the next step after mass consumption, with the added benefit that the buyer is in control of getting a truly unique product.
The article explores a way to achieve this through software, but there are many more ways to pull it off. For example, a sport shoes company has a corporate website in which you order a customized pair of sneakers, allowing you to change a lot of details (there are more than 8 colors in 10 items, IIRC, plus other items with fewer choices).
The old idea (mass consumption) was that you buy whatever fits your lifestyle, that you could really define yourself through buying a different mix of products from different brands. The new idea (customization) is that you keep the same brand but you adapt it to your lifestyle. The advantage (for the company) is that you don't need to look for another brand if you don't like such and such feature, and (for you) that you have a more unique product.
Though as several companies start having it, customization won't guarantee success either. It will probably become necessary but clearly not sufficient. You will always see a real-life version of "attack of the clones" when teenage girls roam the mall in packs clothed exactly the same (who probably won't use customization as much). And you will always see "open-architecture" platforms fail miserably (e.g. 3DO).
I would venture that this is a good thing after all, because it gives the control back to the buyer. If you really want to be different, you have to do a bit of thinking and research yourself, instead of relying on what the company tells you is new/hip/unique but sells in thousands.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
He referenced several lawsuits involving this idea...one in particular regarding aftermarket garage door openers.
I've always asked the question "Why can't I change how long the snooze button silences the alarm?" My clock has a 9 minute snooze...but what if I just want 6 minutes? I'd have to keep buying clocks and find the right one through trial and error. I'd be totally willing to pay more for a clock with a variable snooze.
I have the Linksys WRT54g. There are currently 3 groups creating custom firmware. The fixes and features are rolled out quite a lot faster than Linksys provides. I feel that I have one of the most powerful wireless routers on the market for around $80 now. The bandwidth management and remote VPN features are sweet. Linksys would have never implemented that.
I always wondered why a few engineers don't create an open source hardware solution. I imaging a wireless router isn't more than a few chips laid down on a board. A group should get together and create an open-source hardware platform and then sell it at a slight margin to make up the manufacturing costs. Then let the software gurus continue to add features. Just make sure that the unit has enough ram and MIPS to process future functions. I'm not sure of the BOM cost for a wireless router, but I'm sure it's pretty cheap. An open source hardware router could probably sell for $20 when massed produced. There are 802.11b routers selling that cheap now.
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I think this needs some elaboration.
FNG consumers are monolithic clones. The fact that AOL and MS have been highly successful shows the wisdom of this.
However, consumers do not stay monolithic clones. As they progress through the learning curve, the will try new stuff.
The better user interfaces realize that the user has a learning curve, and offer copious hand-holding at the low end, and get they booty out of the way once you're a keyboard shortcutting, script writing, email integrating tough guy.
Like !me.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I love my iPod, but the most frustrating thing about it is what it could do if Apple allowed people to hack them. For instance, thanks to all the mix CDs and compilations I own, I have over 1700 unique artists in my MP3 collection. Of those, only about 500 have more than one song and only 300 artists have more than 3-4 songs. On the iPod, that means I have to scroll through 4 one-track artists for each of the artists that I own an entire album of. It would be great to have a second "Popular Artist" list that would only show the artists that have more than 3-4 tracks. For a coder, something like that would be easy to write. But because Apple doesn't allow iPod hacking, I'll probably never see that feature. How many other great features are our mp3 players, DVD players, microwaves, automobiles, etc missing becuase people can't hack them? I think one could apply the same argument to Microsoft: what nifty OS features aren't we seeing becuase the only vision of OS we see is the MS vision?