Dear Tech Early Adopters: Manufacturers Don’t Care About You
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
What a load of old bollocks. In his attempt to prove a point he totally over-simplifies the situation.
Sure my mother doesn't care whether her phone has a 900Mhz Targa CPU or a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU. But of course she does care which OS it is. "Why don't the apps I bought on the Apple App Store work on this Android phone I just upgraded to?".
And of course it is not ok for some manufacture to offload some stinky pile of shit tablets to Walgreens, one that have fundamental hardware and software flaws which is why they can't be sold via regular channels, and call them "$99 Android Tablets". Because poor customer who buys said tablet now goes away thinking all Android tablets are crap, perhaps all tablets in general are crap, and goes and tells their friends to boot.
Who else is going to call out the manufacture than the early adopter crowd? Other manufactures can't (it's not the done thing). It makes the space crap for everyone.
And as for saying manufactures don't care about early adopters, most first-gen products are aimed squarely at the early adopter crowd because often on day 0 there isn't the network effect, product development, etc to really bring out a proper fully baked product and so they rely on the early adopter crowd to start the ground swell.
Android G1, current line of Google TVs, First DVD/HD-DVD/Bluray players are all examples of products manufactures built for early-adoptors. Even Apple, usually very good at being totally consumer-focused, has openly been courting he early adopter crowd with the AppleTV while it R&D's in public what the sweet spot is in that space.
Yes, us early adoptors != general public buyers, but this article completely discounts and discredits a still significant and important part of the technology market and ecosystem.
But I agree with you that I have not encountered a computer user, no matter how naive, who didn't take specs into consideration when they buy their next computer. They know they need "more" if nothing else.
In any case, if the early adopters of Apple products are getting a bad deal as the author seems to be saying, where are these unhappy customers? Shouldn't such unhappyness show up in customer satisfaction surveys, where Apple leads by a wide margin?
On the other hand, the author's central point that early adopters often don't make out so well generally is probably true. Experienced tech customers understand the risks, others may not.