Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I really don't think that the price has much at all to do with whether a product becomes a success. The iPod has been a huge success even though it's pretty much the most expensive MP3 player on the market.
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At a
reasonable price for the product, I agree with the above, but what is reasonable depends on the market. UMPC's until now or tablets before are not that hot, because they are too expensive right now. Sony just cut the price of PSP, because despite all the goodies it had, it could not compete with cheaper Nintendo and Xbox, and many examples abound.
For an e-reader device the main obstacle is a lack of free or at least cheap legal current content. The iPod has this since it's so easy to burn a cd. If we had a (free) magic wand that took a print book that we own and in 10 minutes made a digital file (at no cost to us) out of it, e-readers would fly off the shelves.
This is why current prices are too high for the market, though demand is there as we saw recently, the bid-ask spread is still very high, and the buyers are not willing to bid up the prices in numbers, so the sellers will be forced to come down or marginalize the product.