Plastic Logic quits ereaders business

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

It wasn't necessarily the iPad that did the Que in. Imho the fact that 6" e-ink prices dropped like a rock did them in. If it had been just the iPad they could have dropped their price to $400 and still sold well.

Ah, but would they have made any money at that price?

Nobody has said what their yields/costs are like.
6in eink screen prices have dropped because the things sell by the tens of millions; the 10inchers haven't dropped because they don't. And those are built off the same (amortised) tech of the six inchers.

Plastic Logic (like Mirasol) has never ramped up to any significant volume so it is stuck with pilot-scale economies trying to compete with mature economies of scale.

This is an old story: C.F. SED - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface...mitter_display
SED missed its window of opportunity to launch (due to lawsuits) and afterwards, every time Canon refined the manufacturing costs to where they seemed competitive with LCD and Plama and announced a target date, LCD would drop in price and creep upwards in maximum size, rendering the tech uncompetitive. After several rounds, Canon gave up.

This is the challenge that every tech seeking to displace LCD (and *maybe* eink) faces.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Ah, but would they have made any money at that price?

Nobody has said what their yields/costs are like.
6in eink screen prices have dropped because the things sell by the tens of millions; the 10inchers haven't dropped because they don't. And those are built off the same (amortised) tech of the six inchers.

Plastic Logic (like Mirasol) has never ramped up to any significant volume so it is stuck with pilot-scale economies trying to compete with mature economies of scale.

This is an old story: C.F. SED - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface...mitter_display
SED missed its window of opportunity to launch (due to lawsuits) and afterwards, every time Canon refined the manufacturing costs to where they seemed competitive with LCD and Plama and announced a target date, LCD would drop in price and creep upwards in maximum size, rendering the tech uncompetitive. After several rounds, Canon gave up.

This is the challenge that every tech seeking to displace LCD (and *maybe* eink) faces.

The 6" started to sell in the millions because Amazon and Sony took the bold step of going out on a limb, ordering millions and negotiating serious price cuts with e-ink. Meaning the price cuts came first, big sales later.

Back to Plastic Logic, in the business market they could have sold very well. I had, however, the distinctive impression that they hadn't overcome their software problems until the very end, and that was a big part of the reason they pulled the device.

[Barty]

I thought they marketed the que primarily as a business oriented proto-tablet, not an oversized ereader. They were showing off viewing and annotating pdf, word, excel file. IIRC, the price was around $800. The iPad cost less, had colors, and could do all that and more. They scrapped it shortly after the iPad came out.

Also, didn't Hearst have a similar thing? It too got scrapped.

[fjtorres]

The business document management reader market is something of a white whale: many pursue it but nobody has come even close to harpooning it.
Yet.
Brother.
Bridgestone.
Delta.
Plastic Logic.
Ricoh.
All have tried but none have made any headway.

Lost in the hype is that corporate document management/viewing systems are generally in-house developments and airlifted turnkey systems. That went away in the 80's when PCs came in.
Regardless of the hardware tech, any successful corporate document management system needs to be compatible with the pre-existing server-side systems. Which means, mostly, SHAREPOINT. Failing that, it needs a full function browser and at that point you are describing more of a tablet than a reader.
There is a tremendous market waiting for a functional corporate reader system--the New iPad hardware is a good target for the client side--but without solid server compatibility with corporate IT systems, developing clients in a vacuum is just a quick road to oblivion.
It will likely take a few more years before we see a truly viable system.