Re: stupid idea of the day

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From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Sat Sep 23 2000 - 15:41:34 PDT


On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Lane Becker wrote:
> They went under a few years ago; apparently the market wasn't all
> that large. Or maybe it was that it was a Mac-only product back in
> '96, a bad time to be exclusively loyal to Apple.

I remember this. It was a matter of a few months from product
release to fire sale. This is a real problem with putting all your
eggs in one basket that's hooked to a company like Apple (or
Microsoft or Compaq or...), but especially Apple, where an
architectural initiative that reaches the customers is still likely
to wither and die from lack of follow-through--taking any unwary 3rd
parties with it. I think Yo-Yo was tied to the GeoPort, which
overclocked serial port was kind of cool but didn't offer USB speeds
and was Apple-only.

I have drawers (and closets) full of strange and once-cool input
devices for which there is no current software support. Open source
could help there. A cool gizmo with a USB interface and a published
interface would probably get supported on a number of platforms.
Whether this would do much for sales, I dunno. It would make *me*
more likely to buy one.

Eirikur


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