Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
I think the main reason behind both of those is that iRex was too small. When the entire company is 30 employees, probably only a couple of them are software developers.
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I think in the end though, it would have been a miracle for a 30 employee company to survive in a market competing against the likes of Amazon, Sony, and Apple. Especially with what looks like now is shaping up to be a price war between two of them. There's no way a relatively tiny company would have been able to survive that war.
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Well the quote is indicative of a broken set of priorities. If you think hardware alone is going to save you in this market you have the wrong idea about the nature of this market. Remember when Apple's PowerPC line was producing slow, generally unresponsive computers? They managed to keep their clientèle with their software package (See OSX) while transitioning their hardware to a faster Intel processor. In the land of non-programmers, software is king. The iLiad was really a luxury product for us programmer types and the sad reality is there isn't a great deal of us around capable of shelling out that kind of money to potentially brick something.
They never made it to the price war. Their only initial competitor was Sony, which, at the time, they could have easily crushed despite the higher price of their unit. That sounds dirty to say.
Plus, I find the it somewhat amusing using the example of 'Big Corporate Giants', like Apple, Amazon and Sony. Each one of these companies started out as the underdog before making it big. No one thought someone would pay that much for a telephone, they did. Apple won. No one thought that an online store could out perform a brick and mortar store, it did. Amazon won. Hell, no one thought a Japanese company would be capable of taking on giants like GE and Philips, it did. Sony won (only to of course become fat and inflexible themselves, fortunately not nearly as badly as GE or Philips).
The reason every one of these companies managed to beat out their bigger badder competitors was simply the ability to provide a better user experience to its customers. Hence the software problem. iRex simply did not do that, they never considered it a priority, or if they did they never adjusted themselves to their customers expectations, and they reap insolvency as a result.