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OLPC and the "Innovator's Opportunity"
viralMeme sends in a piece from OLPC News featuring a video interview with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepson. The interview goes over some of the improvements in the company's extremely power-efficient screen technology that will show up in the next generations of the OLPC. The article links a video side-by-side comparison among Pixel Qi, Kindle, and Toshiba R600 displays in sunlight and in shade; Pixel Qi is arguably more readable than Kindle, and in full color. Jepson refers to Clayton Christenson's 1997 classic The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining a seeming paradox in high-tech: why companies that listen to their customers aren't the ones that innovate. According to the article it's mainly because "the next big market isn't with your current customers. It's with a vastly larger group of would-be users who couldn't afford your previous products, or couldn't carry around the huge devices of previous generations." Jepson says, "The cool thing about the Pixel Qi technology is, you know, poor kids in Africa got it first... It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma."
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
You listen to your customers because they mostly can't articulate what they want. But you do have to understand their needs.
The OLPC is a stupid idea, because it's based on the assumption that the needs of poor kids in Africa are unique.
The first company that realizes the obvious, and sticks a power efficient screen in an ergonomic form factor, ignores all Microsoft attacks and bribes to make it run 7, and makes it almost disposable cheap... ...will have a product that the whole world will stampede to buy.
anymore? In the classic Innovator's Opportunity, netbooks have pretty much rendered this thing completely useless. They do pretty much the same thing(are actually better in some areas), for about the same price, sans all the smugness.
One of these screens with a low-power ARM CPU motherboard would be a really sweet geek laptop. It seems like that could hit a price that would be attractive to a lot of people while performing well enough to actually be useful. But all we're hearing from Pixel Qi at the moment is silence, and I'm betting the first laptop to come with this screen, if one ever does, will have an Atom CPU and run Windows. I wonder if Pixel Qi would be willing to sell these in hobbyist quantities... :'}
According to the interview, Pixel Qi are still supporting OLPC, but they aren't designing just for -- or even primarily for OLPC any longer. It is neat that kids in Africa were the first market for the new display technology, but we're going to see the newer Pixel Qi stuff in commercial netbooks long before the XO-2 is out, most likely.
The newest stuff does full color in direct sun, and apparently the generation after this will cut power consumption by a bunch.
That's fine. But the Innovator's Dilemma is a wholly unrelated to that form of customers not knowing what they want. Here is an excellent introduction to the Innovator's Delemma. The article talks about the rapid changes in the hard drive industry over.
This article isn't about customers not knowing what they want. It's about how over time, who your customers are can radically change as brand new markets emerge. For example, hard disk business with mainframes was all about cost per megabyte. But in the new desktop computer market, the criteria by which things are judged is totally different than just cost per megabyte. Overall cost for the unit is more important, and physical size. A mainframe customer wouldn't be interested in a drive that costs more per megabyte but is smaller and has an overall lower price per unit-- but a desktop customer would be interested. The topic of the article is that if you exclusively listen to your customers without contemplating how the world is changing, you can sink yourself. Same situation with the newspaper industry: over-focus on existing markets and existing business lines can cause you to not see the opportunity in emerging markets, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.
I've read lots of vague new stories about this over the past few months and seen lots of videos but I'd like them to just release some proper technical specs without having to parse a collection of transcribed press releases and watch dull 10 minute videos.
how much exactly does a screen cost at each size?
Resolution at each size or DPI?
response time?
Power usage in W?
I'm not interested in your philosophy. When can I buy your product without jumping through OLPC's hoops?
"XP mode" just lets you run older programs for which the developers haven't cranked out a Windows 7 patch/version yet. It's not like you can just dual-boot XP and ignore you have 7 or something.
Instead OLPC twiddled its thumbs and Asus, Acer and others stole the market from right under them. I still think OLPC could salvage something by doing a commercial variant. After all, it still has some advantages over the competition, not least of which its designed for kids. Lots of parents would buy an OLPC for their kid if they could walk into Toys R Us and buy one off the shelf.
You forgot to tag the article as "old news".
We have seen all those videos long time ago.
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