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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
