However, long before I could afford to buy gadgets of any quality, I had to be very careful where I spent my money. I would wait and see if the prices came down (which, according to Moore's Law, they always did). In some cases, (such as a decent Digital SLR camera), I've postponed the purchase so long I'm not sure when I will finally buy... but I'll obviously get far more megapixels for my money than I would have 2 or 3 years ago.
Back in the eighties (showing my age) I couldn't afford a Walkman (or a clone) until I was 16... no one bought one for me (we lived in a cardboard box in't' middle of road), and I had to save up to pay for one. And when the time came, I looked at Which? Magazine to compare the models available at that time, and traipsed up and down Tottenham Court Road in central London going into every electronics shop to compare prices and haggle with the shopkeepers until I found the bestest one that fit my budget.
It was an easy choice, all of the players played cassettes. CDs didn't exist then, but the same search would have been undertaken just a few years later for a CD player, or stereo. For TVs - again - the same kind of search. You can decide on CRT or flat-screen, Plasma or LCD, but they all need to show broadcast content.
When mp3 players came along, the choice was equally easy, until Apple reared it's over-styled head with the iPod, which was unable to play the 25GB of mp3s I'd accumulated by digitising my entire CD collection...without me going to the hassle of reformatting my entire collection. Disc space on my computer at that time meant that that was not going to happen easily, and anyway, why should I? The other mp3 players were cheaper, had more capacity and had built-in FM radios and voice recorders as standard. But to the great unwashed masses, they weren't as 'cool' as Apple.
Apple, to give them their due, did a good job of tying people in to their brand with the vertical integration of their iTunes store with the iPod players. So why did the iPod win over the other mp3 players to become the defacto player? Could it be that by providing legitimate, (i.e. 'legal') downloads for the hairy hoards, that is that by providing the content, they were guaranteeing the success of the player?
And not for the first time has this happened. When video cassette recorders (VCR) came along at the end of the seventies and early eighties, the decision was between two rival formats. The superior format, superior in quality of image and fidelity of recording and playback, was Betamax... the choice for professionals before and since. The popular format, however, was VHS. Why? There has been lots of debate as to the reasons, but I'm going to add my tuppence-worth to that debate, for our household pondered the same question at that time, three decades ago. Ultimately, we wanted content. We wanted to be able to rent any film (well, to have a selection of hundreds rather than dozens)... and the local videostores all had huge selections of VHS films and one tiny shelf of Betamax. Simple. We went with VHS... as did most people... with Betamax dying an unhappy death as a consumer product.
What is irritating is that the issues of the Betamax vs VHS debate repeat themselves. We do not learn from history (or do we?). Betamax was the superior product, but VHS won out. Everyone who bought a Betamax player ended up storing it on the attic for another 20 years, unable to throw away such an underused piece of equipment, and fuming that they'd wasted hundreds of pounds, backing the wrong proverbial horse in the format wars.
So now to the latest gadget. The e-Book reader. With the recent launch of the Amazon Kindle in the UK, there have been lots of articles telling the world how wonderful they are... but ignoring the same problem we saw with mp3 players and video recorders. Format.
So, the ones that are on my radar now are the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader Touch Edition, the Cool-er, the Elonex eReader; and the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the US book shop chain. Will I buy one? Not yet.
I've tried the Amazon Kindle. After hearing so much noise about e-Ink (or is it e-Paper?) I am quite disappointed to find the dull screen that has all the lack-lustre of paper with none of the comforting texture of it. I'm also surprised at how heavy it is. It's a small gadget, thin, not much bigger on the front than a typical paper-back. But it can't comfortably be held in one hand for any length of time, as a paperback can. You'd need to rest it on your knee or a table... although for that, why not use a laptop? And no touch-screen? Where have they been hiding for the past 3 years? It took me a while to realise that they expected me to use buttons to turn pages rather than swiping the screen.
The Sony Reader has a similar screen size, looks cleaner, and the leather-pouch makes it easier to hold (like real books) than the Amazon version.
But I fear that ultimately, it's going to come down to content again. Amazon is the online bookstore of choice, but since Google announced last week that they were going to start selling e-books themselves (and remember that they've been scanning all known books over the past few years - including hundreds of thousands of orphan books), one has to assume that content is going to win again... and the reader that wins will be the one that has the biggest catalogue of books available to download.
But... but... what if... what if Google's Eric Schmidt, Sony's Howard Stringer and Amazon's Jeff Bezos sat down together and came to a deal? What if they decided to not follow the Apple model of tying people into one particular format, but allowed all Google books, and all Amazon books, to be downloadable on all readers, be they from Sony, Amazon, Elonex or whoever?
They'd still make their money from the downloads.
They'd have a wider potential audience by not restricting themselves to owners of one particular reader.
They'd drive the uptake of e-book readers as the public would no longer hold off to see which kerchunk wins.
Everyone talks about 'collaboration' and 'Web 2.0' and 'Social' until they talk about business... then it's back to the same old cut-throat winner-takes-all mentality of decades ago.
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