Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It's not *my* idea. it is Osbourne 's.
And it's not about what consumers will or won't buy but about how *many* will buy and what economic sense it makes for the *business*.
Adequacy means meeting the needs of enough customers to turn a profit.
Any added feature needs to bring in enough *added* buyers to justify the expense and product complexity. Adding features adds cost and complexity, often resulting in lower reliability and lower profits despite higher costs.
The best example in recent times is the story of the PS3 that ended up with the firing of Playstation architect Kutaragi. Sony lost more money over the first three years of PS3 than they made over the entire PS2 generation (on the order of $16B). It cost them anywhere from $900-1200 per console to build, yet they sold for $600.
The original PS3 launched with 100% backwards compatibility because it had a PS2 chipset built-in, it had full BluRay compatibility (and was cheaper than contemporary BD players in Japan so a good fraction of the 20 and 40GB models were used solely for audio and video playback) and they even provided hooks for Linux, which resulted in people building compute server clusters with PS3s instead of gaming.
All those things were true advances in gaming consoles and found people quite happy to buy because of those features. But those buyers weren't the core customers that bought Playstations to game. And they weren't enough to justify the features, especially when they didn't bring in added revenue by buying games.
It took them three years of removing extraneous features and introducing a PSlite focused on gaming that they actually started maiking money.
Microsoft made a similar mistake with the original XBOX ONE by making the Kinect motion sensor (a true advance in computer vision technology) a mandatory component of the system at a time the core console buyer was playing FPS, RPG, or MMORG games instead of party games.
The core ereader buyer wants easy access to commercial and PD ebooks. Readability matters a bit less, which is why the entry level models sell just fine.
Some people care about larger sizes, color changes, waterproofing, pen markup, or even social features. But not a majority or even plurality.
Ask any Kindle ereader buyer why they bought it, and the Kindle store is tops. Even front lighting used to be secondary until last year. Welcome and a sales driver but not essential. A lot of people did without to save the extra cost.
Products exist to make a profit, not to satisfy commenters or pundits.
Sometimes that is pricing to maximize volume, sometimes that means premium pricing and enough added features to excuse the higher price. It's not about market share (ask Palm Conputing about protecting narket share at any cost) but about profit. Share follows adequacy and mission suitability.
"Adequacy is sufficient" is why 6-8in ereaders dominate, by far, the market and why bigger models with pens, color, etc, are at best niche. Because the added value doesn't bring enough sales to justify the cost.
"Adequacy is sufficient" comes from the same business school as KISS--"Keep it simple, stupid"--and, most recently, Elon Musk's "The best part is no part, the best process is no process". It is about identifying what a market needs and offering it at the best price to maximize profits.
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And yet, some 62% of the eBook market uses tablets and 61% use smartphones (yes, people do read on multiple devices). Dedicated eReaders are most popular with readers 55 and up, who are the most likely not to have a smart phone or table.
Interestingly, when broken out by app on a tablet, the most popular is the Kindle app (20%), followed by Apple iBooks (16%) and Goggle Books (14%).