Hi Panagiotis
If you look at the process of developing a Customer Value Proposition (http://www.appliedproductmarketing.com/resources/CustomerValuePropositionEssentials_eBook.pdf) the third component to look at - after the timeframe during which the proposition is valid and the intended customer of the proposition - is the 'next best alternative'. The Indie Box has a huge number of alternatives for the USD 500 the Wired article says it will cost. The vast majority of alternatives involve spending the money on completely different things that will have a higher value to customers, for example a new flat screen TV, a new barbeque, or even a romantic weekend break with the wife.
I suggest the attributable market size for the IndieBox is in reality very very small indeed, mainly limited to those who are quite literally obsessed with their privacy and who have the technical competence to run a secure home server with all that entails. Rather than the IndieBox moving the average customer 'towards a direction we must go' I suggest it leads them down an expensive blind alley. They don't want privacy hardware, they want privacy outcomes. There must be better Privacy-as a-Service solutions out there.
Johannes. Have you done any market sizing studies for the IndieBox yet? How many do you think you would you need to sell to breakeven on your total go to market expenses? Have you worked through the very different economics of your multi-sided market platform?
Best regards from Edinburgh, Graham
PS. I have worked in multi-sided software markets for some years. If you haven't read it, you might find Evans et al's book on 'Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries', MIT Press very interesting. You can download it from the MIT Press website for free at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262050852_Download_the_full_text.pdf
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Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. Mai 2014 um 10:01 Uhr
Von: "Panagiotis Stathopoulos" <
>
An: "Graham Reginald Hill" <
>
Cc: "Johannes Ernst" <
>, "ProjectVRM list" <
>
Betreff: Re: [projectvrm] Wired article on Indie Box… Ownership vs Outcomes
Hi all,
My personal view is that while your comment wrt renting instead of owning hw while correct in principle, the matter of fact is that when you "rent", or more importantly you are given free use of resources, usually you give up a degree of freedom and control, at a level "above" and "higher" than the resource you are renting.
This question is set on the 'Age of Access' and along with the opportunities are lot of implicit dangers. Optimally you could have the capability to rent resources in a transparent way and over APIs that permit this, unfortunatelly there is no marketplace for that.
You could have an indie box transparrent in an IaaS Cloud as a solution towards your proposal (and I suppose that this is possible), but my feeling is that this would be to technical for most users while probably more expensive! A C2C market as you describe would be also great but for the time beeing relevant examples (e.g. Diaspora etc) have not seemed to work.
In this sense moves like indiebox etc. are towards a direction we must go. Hopefully in the end also an IaaS marketplace for indiebox instances or even better a C2C resource sharing platform would be a solution to the problem you are mentioning.
Regards
Panagiotis