It’s tempting to say that one business decision or another could have saved the company (and we all know they made some bonkers ones) but there is no evidence of a new device category becoming mainstream from a new company in the past 2 decades. Palm and Blackberry were last. Why is that? - ThreadSky

omershapira.com • 14 days ago

It’s tempting to say that one business decision or another could have saved the company (and we all know they made some bonkers ones) but there is no evidence of a new device category becoming mainstream from a new company in the past 2 decades. Palm and Blackberry were last. Why is that?

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chrisoffner3d.bsky.social•14 days ago

Depends on your definition of "mainstream" but I'd say consumer drones from DJI or Fitness Trackers from Fitbit would be two examples.

omershapira.com•14 days ago

Consumer drones solve a ‘need’ that’s not leisure for a very small fragment of the market, and for those I do agree.
Fitness trackers should be mainstream by definition (most ppl have at least 1 body) but are clearly not, and I think it’s 100% a product/benefit appeal problem.

chrisoffner3d.bsky.social•14 days ago

The Apple Watch is an extremely mainstream fitness tracker (albeit not by the new company Fitbit that started the category).

omershapira.com•14 days ago

Are you saying this based on intuition? Because I don’t know what sales figures clear the bar for “extremely mainstream” but it’s not “1 Poland per year w/a 4yr lifetime”
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1421546/apple-watch-sales-worldwide/

chrisoffner3d.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yeah, I say this based on my impression that a very large percentage of people I see is wearing an Apple Watch (including myself), but maybe that's not representative. To be fair, based on what I see when I walk around Zurich, you'd also think the Apple AirPods Max are wildly successful. 🤷‍♂️

chrisoffner3d.bsky.social•14 days ago

But again, if your benchmark for sales is iPhone numbers I don't think many products are mainstream at all. What products would you classify as mainstream?

omershapira.com•14 days ago

Imho:
1. No new device today offers unimaginable life improvements. Look at the struggle the Quest has for growth on a subsidized product.
2. The bar is now to make a previous ecosystem irrelevant before allowing a switch (only path to margin). Desktop email clients didn’t threaten Blackberry.

chrisoffner3d.bsky.social•14 days ago

The only device category I've seen that I could imagine succeeding the smartphone ecosystem some time in the future is Meta's Orion, although I don't trust Meta to be able to pull it off, and I don't think it has the public goodwill and trust for people to buy into its ecosystem.

nathanhoobler.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think there's also sometimes a problem with the modern marketplace relying so much on monetization of user data and ecosystem, which turns every product into a loss leader that small, non-vertically integrated companies simply can't compete with on value.

nathanhoobler.bsky.social•14 days ago

Nest smart thermostats (before being acquired by Google)?

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