RIP CE
I read with chagrin the latest news from Dash Express. These are clearly tough times and we wish them luck with their new model. But I think this actually points to something far deeper and more seismic: there is literally no future in the traditional model of consumer electronics (CE). There’s no there there. Anyone thinking of investing in it the way it’s currently constructed is crazy.
It is beyond difficult to innovate in hardware today. There are literally only a handful of players doing it well. And even they are just moments away from catastrophe if they can’t keep the hits coming (hi Motorola). Compare this to the world of software where thousands of developers are innovating on a global scale.
Does it HAVE to be this way? Is it written on stone tablets somewhere that the current method of creating hardware is the one and only way? Of course not. Just like it wasn’t ordained that all computing was to happen on mainframe computers, or that all knowledge of the printed word belonged to the elite. Change in both these examples came as a result of innovation-enabling technologies; new tools that allowed whole, previously excluded, groups of people to learn and benefit.
Right now, the whole world of electronics is hamstrung by what feels like a lack of equivalent enabling technologies. The result is that everyone loses. Investors lose because because their returns are subject to a completely unpredictable hit-based financial model. Producers lose for basically the same reason. Consumers lose because the attendant lack of innovation and lowest-common-denominator products restricts the value we could actually be deriving from new technologies.
Imagine if Dash could have built its product using both open source software AND hardware IP. I guarantee they could have brought it to market faster and at a fraction of the cost. That, in turn, would have freed up some of that $71M for other investment areas like retail distribution, international markets, etc. The point is, you shouldn’t need massive resources from huge firms like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins to innovate in hardware. You sure don’t need it for software anymore. The hardware world needs a 21st-century, bottoms-up, open source model of innovation.
I know it seems incredibly self-serving to try and proclaim the emergence of a new revolution. And, of course, I can’t say that I’m not personally invested in its success, but irrespective of whether or not Bug Labs will play a meaningful part in it, the forces of disruption are coming.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
“Imagine if Dash could have built its product using both open
source software AND hardware IP. I guarantee they could have
brought it to market faster and at a fraction of the cost.”
Open source software is not the panacea that everyone makes it out to be. All too often it is in the process of maturing – it’s in flux and/or its development schedule is not congruent with the needs of a product life cycle.
The real funny part of your assumption is that hardware IP can be serviced by open-source software. It takes a wealth of time and resources to get there – hardware bring up,m board spins, 3rd party issues, driver support, and testing are just some of the hurdles. If you are making the next great laptop, it probably not hard. If you are making a new device that does something where there is no reference platform or blueprint already in existence, the job just got hard – real hard (think bootloader, kernel, drivers, app abstraction layer to begin with). And no matter how hard you try, throwing apt-get onto your new device does not help with low level crappola.
All in all – that’s a friggin’ naive statement to make.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Anonymous Coward – thanks for the comment. It would definitely be naive if you thought that the ways things are are the ways things will remain. My whole point is it can and will change. I’m not suggesting it will suddenly get easy. Open source software is not easy. But instead of separate teams of corporate engineers working in secret, we will start to see a global community of engineers working on every aspect of hardware IP in the open. Twenty years ago it would not have been surprising to hear your comment made about operating systems.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
i think that the truth lies somewhere in between. i think that open source is a very useful tool, in fact i am writing this from a computer running a modified version of debian linux. but at the same time, i also make use of closed source software, such as the proprietary Nvidia driver in my linux system (though you can argue that this would be unnecessary if Nvidia made their hardware specifications public). low level hardware interfaces seem to require a dedicated team of professionals more than anything else.
secondly, even if making the entire project open source would have brought the dash to market faster and as a superior product, would they want to? if they had, another company could easily copy it, not exactly the greatest business model. business can work with open source, but not necessarily in all aspects.