Quote:
Originally Posted by Jmirko
We have all been puzzled by Sony limiting sales of the DPT-S1 to certain professions and asking a very high price. I have been trying to come up with a plausible explanation for this, but not sure I succeeded:
1. They have supply constraints (e.g. E-ink cannot manufacture enough screens) and want to sell the available units to markets which are promising in the long term (e.g. law firms using the device as a work tool will probably move on to the next model instead of switching to the competition, even if it's cheaper).
2. They have some quality concerns (e.g. longevity of the Mobius screen) and want to limit their exposure to a small, controlled group of users in order to collect feedback and avoid damaging the brand on a wider scale.
3. They are simply trying to maximise their profit by keeping prices high, knowing that the competition will also have high production costs (as Sony is probably receiving royalties from E-Ink for each screen sold) and therefore high prices. (This does not explain the supply constraint though.)
To be honest, I don't think any of these are particularly plausible, except maybe 1. What do you think? Does anybody have a better explanation?
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The production line may still be small and experimental, limiting the supply. I wonder if the market is too small to justify the cost of going to a larger, more efficient production line? As to keeping out of the consumer market, I vaguely recall that they had some kind of back-end server software available for distributing the edited documents, and they probably want to sell that along with the limited supply of physical devices.