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Originally Posted by Azayzel
Just thought I'd interject a brief analogy with this device and another device that didn't initially jump mainstream... the Palm Pilot.
When this device first came out, not many people used it and the user-base was quite low. I saw it for what it could do and embraced it quite readily. Now, 13 years later there are a ton of devices that, initially, mimicked the device and eventually evolved into their own. While I cannot draw correlations with the original Palm Pilot developer, Palm Computing (a division of US Robotics), and mega-bucks $ony, it did start as a good idea that eventually evolved into many of the devices you see today; i.e., mobile phones PDA's, stand-alone PDA's, and their ilk.
The way I see it is that Sony sparked the fire by jumping back in with an eReader and supporting it somewhat through its infancy. They could have ignored it and settled things by moving on after their aborted Librie fiasco, but someone very smart in their enterprise saw the potential of such a device and look at things now, there are quite a few clones popping up and many happy users.
I know it's not right to make a statement to the effect that Sony pioneered the eReader movement, they didn't, but they have given it quite a push that will see it to it's inevitable fruition.
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We can hope. I think the critical issue will be timing.
After Palm pioneered the PDA market, and Handspring split off to do a budget PalmOS device line, Sony hopped in with the Clie, and produced a number of innovative devices with a large and devoted fan base. They got
out of the PDA market because while the Clies made money, they didn't make
enough money. Sony senior management looked at the return on their investment and concluded they could get a better return investing the money elsewhere.
I don't know what Sony's numbers look like on the Reader, and I assume they expect to take losses till the market opens up and the device becomes successful. The question is how long they are prepared to wait, and what they consider "success".
It's a two edged sword. On one hand, Sony is big and very well heeled, and can afford to make an investment to do this. On the other, they are big enough that revenues and profits that might make a smaller company quite happy will be insufficient to justify their continued involvement.
And Sony has had enough problems in recent years (and still is, with the Playstation 3) that management has become more hard nosed about expecting revenues and profits from operations, and is quicker to exit underperforming investments.
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Dennis