Re: [projectvrm] Wired article on Indie Box… Ownership vs Outcomes

[Johannes Ernst < >]

On May 13, 2014, at 3:01, Graham Reginald Hill < "> > wrote:

 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.

One common mistake that people make when looking at new kinds of products -- don't mean to single you out here, Graham, it's common -- is to say "but the existing alternatives are much better/cheaper/...", so nobody will do this. While the first may be true at a particular point in time, the second does not follow.

Technology history is full of examples. For example, why would anybody have bought an Altair back then? Or an Apple 1? it was insane, it couldn't do anything other than being an expensive toy. Vacation with the wife was certainly an economically better decision. And for many years after, you still couldn't reliably print from a PC! Mainframes did all of this, much much better. But somehow the PC took over -- because it did some things the people thinking "mainframe" couldn't even conceive of.

I consider Indie Box One to be similar to an Apple 1, roughly. (Note most of our rewards require assembly using a RPi or an x86) There will be others, over time, the price points will come down (ARM is breathing down into this market), the functionality will go up, new apps will show up that we cannot foresee yet (Visicalc, anybody?).

I don't know whether the Indie Box Project is the thing that sparks this. (I sure hope!) For some people ubiquitous PCs were inevitable, even before the Apple 1. For me -- and a lot of geeks, I should say -- personal servers are inevitable. Note that market sizing studies cannot be done on markets that don't exist (yet), because all we can do is pull numbers out of hats. Garbage-in/garbage-out as my professor used to say.

It's okay if you don't believe in the same thing. I cannot prove my point, as you can't prove your's.  

We can only invent the future we'd like to live in, and I'd like to live in the one that has lots of personally-controlled servers in it :-)

Cheers,

Johannes.