On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <luke.leighton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: >> > > Âit's very interesting that it's been the U.S. companies whose > attitude has been "your product will fail, therefore we do not wish to > be involved". Âi find this fascinating. It is far more subtle than that. Note the job title: I do product development for a living. Your product won't fail - I am sure if you find the money to advance development beyond pre-production prototype, and that is a rather significant amount of money, you might sell a few units. Getting industrial design done, EMI testing, FCC/CE/NOM certification, and then ramping it up to a reasonable production economy will double your budget, minimum. Don't forget shipping them from Taiwan, freight, and delays in part ordering, and price fluctuations making your hair fall out. Designing an ARM Netbook is going to cost you about a million bucks out of pocket for the first 1,000 units. You'd better be willing to sell them for $1000 each to recoup the costs involved if you want it back immediately. Can you guarantee you'll sell 1,000 units on a consumer level? Can you guarantee 10,000? In that case you can offset the cost and give your system an ultimate BOM cost of $100 and sell it for about $250. Without those guarantees and without up front funding and investment, your product will fail. No company would take on the project if it meant expending significant resources on something that at best case end up as a doorstop. I can point you at several "community efforts" which do mean well but have ended up basically either being chucked in the trash or not being anything close to viable. Remeber the Crunchpad that became the JooJoo? Without the nitty gritty details I can't say what actually went on between Arlington and Fusion Garage but I suspect the reason is Fusion Garage put in significant funding through investors and could not find volume in the market the TechCrunch guys though it would attract, at the price they wanted (which amounts to selling at a loss). It is not possible to create a loss leader without having something next to it that is not slightly overpriced to compensate. Apple do this with the iPod - the device is sold above manufacturing cost, but well below development cost. They make money on the iTunes store. For every 99 cent tune they sell, they get paid. When they get sold in batches of 12, they get paid 12 times. When 50 million people do it once a week, who cares if they recoup the money on hardware and OS development? Take Android's App Store: the vendors don't get anything, but the App Store drives them to the product. The phones are subsidized by the telecoms companies so that the demand for a fart app can be met with a $99 phone that cost $300 to build. The vendor is happy because they are protected by the subsidization model.and is being paid back in full (+profit) for the cost of the phone, and the telecoms company can do it because it makes a huge profit on the mandatory 2-year subscription ($60 a month for a worth-$10-in-infrastructure data plan pays for your phone in such a way that every phone is written off in 3-4 months and the rest is gravy). It is all about recouping investment, and no amount of investment in this product being discussed will ever be recouped. You need to find yourselves a wealthy guy who will back your cause. I am surprised Mark Shuttleworth hasn't done something like it already - you'd think the largest most successful consumer-oriented open source distribution in the last 5 years would do well to have development hardware available. -- Matt Sealey <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Product Development Analyst, Genesi USA, Inc. _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
