Quote:
Originally Posted by mtreader
Thanks. I'd never heard of the Osborne Effect, though I figured official announcements would be scarce. I didn't know if info often got leaked and posted anywhere.
|
The tech world tries to forget about Adam Osbourne and the *two* lessons he taught the industry. The perils of preannouncements is actually the lesser lesson. The more important one, which is constantly ignored, is his mantra of "Adequacy is sufficient."
Most companies succumb to their marketing depts (and pundits's) desire for long feature checklists and keep adding things to their product, usually of marginal benefit, just to justify a new model, often at a higher price. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the goldplating features do nothing for sales because customers just want the thing to do the basics, just well and reliably.
This is prevalent in ebooks where things like color changing backlights and water resistance are touted over usability and software stability. Marketing doesn't consider reliability to be as important as being able to brag about "new and improved". Most ereaders don't come any closer to water than a fridge door and the alleged merits of colored frontlighting are dubious at best.
There's a lot of carping over ereader "stagnation" because most ereaders do just the one thing: display ebooks. As long as they do that well, they'll sell. The rest is just marketing oneupmanship, of limited value to most buyers.
Adequacy is Sufficient.
More companies need to remember that.
(Amazon's Lab126 does, though.)
As for early reports of non-Amazon readers, the Digital Reader Blog does a decent job:
https://the-digital-reader.com/posts/
Also, the ebook reader blog:
https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com