> Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products
> But there does appear to be a weak correlation between a company’s ability to churn out concept products and its ability to design, manufacture and profitably sell products based on those.
There have been commercial windows tablet computers out for years now. From a number of different manufacturers. I think their problem was that they went with the stylus interface instead of fingers. That and they don't have that 'reality distortion/influence field' of Apple to make everyone believe that whatever new computing paradigm they introduce is the way of the future.
Yes, Windows tablet computers relied on the stylus. I've used a couple.
Did you read the article? The article is not about the relative minor success of Windows-based tablets; it is about how the lack of constraints on price (how much it will cost to manufacture) and manufacturing (how you will make it on a mass scale) can make prototype concepts alluringly too easy.
For example, Apple had to develop state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to produce the Aluminum unibody MacBook.
According to the video, Ives said the unibody is fabricated from an extruded piece of aluminum, then CNC'd using various jigs and fixtures. He then states how the most difficult part of the process was "developing" the various jigs and fixtures to produce the desired final results.
But he goes into no detail regarding this aspect.
Why do you consider this "state-of-the-art"? CNCing aluminum extrusions in jigs and fixtures in nothing new.
I was actually disappointed when a saw a unibody being manufactured and thought, "They're milling these?"
So, I really don't believe that other manufacturers barrier to entry in the tablet space is lack of CNC capabilities (but maybe fixture design?).
> Yes, Windows tablet computers relied on the stylus. I've used a couple.
So this was not an example of them creating a concept product. Right? That was the point I was making. However valid and insightful the article you linked to may be, it doesn't seem to address this specific case and neither does the video.
> Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products
> But there does appear to be a weak correlation between a company’s ability to churn out concept products and its ability to design, manufacture and profitably sell products based on those.
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=UTF-8&hl...