Will there be a long tail for devices?
Accenture, August 13, 2007
MIT’s David Clark predicts that in 15 or 20 years there will be a trillion devices connected to the Internet. If you divide a trillion by 9 billion – the upper end of population forecasts for the next 15 to 20 years – you get 111 networked devices per person.
When numbers get that large, you expect to get a power law effect. That is, there will be a few “hit” products that everyone owns, but most of the products will lie along the “long tail” and each one will appeal to only a handful of people.
We are used to this phenomenon in the media industry. For every Harry Potter book there are thousands of obscure books. In fact, I understand that the average book sells only 500 copies. The same goes for music, movies, and blogs.
But devices? The conventional wisdom is that a company should not even think about bringing a consumer electronics device to market unless it is expected to sell in the millions. How can anyone hope to make money on a device with a target market of only 500 units?
Well, I’ve run across a company that appears to be committed to changing the scale of the device industry. It goes by the name of Bug Labs and has recently lined up some venture money. In his first blog posting, Peter Semmelhack, apparently the head bug, describes his company as “Legos meets Web services & APIs.”
He goes on to say, “Imagine being able to build any gadget you wanted by simply connecting simple, functional components together. Now imagine being able to easily program, share and connect these gadgets in interesting ways. In essence, we’re building an open source-based platform for programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware to run it on.”
This strikes me as a highly imaginative product strategy that might just work. It certainly fits in with the notion of Trivergence where the device can be at one place on the network, its data at another place, and its controls at a third place.
The Bug Labs strategy puts the Device on the same footing as the Controls and Data. That is, if I understand correctly, Bug’s goal is to make the hardware as easy to “program” as its supporting software. If they pull off that feat, we might just see the networked device industry start sprouting a long tail.
[via Accenture Blogs]
——-
