

It’s all about the product, not the technology - ariannahsimpson
http://davidzhang.me/post/31753564704/its-all-about-the-product-not-the-technology?hn

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roryreiff
I'm not entirely sure what your distinction is between hardware and 'product.'
I would argue that 'product' as you argued for should be a meeting of
hardware, software and UI/UX. Any one (or two) of these items on it's own
pales in comparison to a healthy balance of all three.

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DavidZhangToGo
Yes that's exactly what I was arguing for, not just how much it cost to
manufacture the product.

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hashpipe
From the VB article - "The truth is that if your company sells hardware today,
your business model is essentially over". And you are comparing a complete
product with only hardware / software.

I agree with you when you say "Its all about the product", and even the VB
author does ("No one can make money selling hardware anymore. The only way to
make money with hardware is to sell something else and get consumers to pay
for the whole device and experience"). That term "experience" encapsulates a
lot of what you talk about in your article.

Both, the VB author and you actually talk about the same thing. You somehow
dont see it that way.

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DavidZhangToGo
Yes and no. The VB article talks about hardware as if Shenzhen engineered
everything. In the end, they're just some manufacture copying TI or Qualcomm's
reference designs. It's quite sensationalist I think.

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hashpipe
Yeah the heading might have been a bit sensationalist, but underneath
everybody was logical & made sense. His main idea that hardware-only
businesses are dead is right to the point (and so are you in saying that
software alone is dead). Its all about integrating everything/anything for
that perfect product.

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mdhayes
A definition of product I like is one where the product is more than the
'product'. By this I mean the product includes added value stuff, like sales
experience, after sales and peripheral items (for example does the car come
with mats).

Focusing on just the physical 'product' and not taking into account everything
that fits into the above definition will leave customers with a poor overall
experience.

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moocow01
"then I declare software dead, since it costs $0 to manufacture software"

Please send me the name and contact of the dev shop you are using.

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DavidZhangToGo
Key differentiation here is manufacture, not design.

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majormajor
Designing software's easy; writing it is hard and has edge cases and all that
fun stuff. ;)

I see things like 'moocow01: free duplication isn't the same thing as it
costing $0 to manufacture software. Software is "manufactured" almost
exclusively on a one-off basis.

 _However_ , there are still similarities. New languages, frameworks, tools,
etc, basically do the same thing to software as the $35 tablet represents in
hardware. There are a lot of new tools in the past five or ten years that will
let you quickly create something that's now seen as basic, but would've taken
much more work to duplicate in the past.

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ollysb
In this context design means developing the product, manufacturing means
shipping it. Manufacturing software really means copying the binary, which
obviously doesn't cost very much...

