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by robolange
924 days ago
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I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even come close to a market of normies. - The raw idea seems easy. - The initial implementation seems like it should be of moderate difficulty, but is actually very challenging to get even close to right. - The long term maintenance is a nightmare, but don't worry, you won't survive long enough to worry about that. - The infrastructure and policy implications of getting and keeping it connected to everyone else are intractable. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531969 for some tip-of-the-iceberg examples.) And yeah, none of that even touches on marketing. |
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I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never possibly work. And, further, that no one has ever implemented the kind of system that I have in mind that I've seen. But that's not because it's unique or complex, just that it isn't a good path to a minimum viable product, so it isn't a good way to spin up a company quickly.
But yeah; aside from burning through cash in order to build enough coverage (maybe a year of dev just on this; no product dev yet) for a product that you will never actually profit from, I don't see how anyone could bring something like this to market.
All of that aside, a product that can sustain a company is not the only way to have a product exist. Modular productization and loss leading are a couple of ways to envision this. But I'm betting some kind of fractional componentization starts happening that makes this kind of stuff more maintainable. YMMV, though!