I have to applaud Michael Arrington for going out of his comfort zone and taking on a sizeable project that is not guaranteed to be successful but if fairly successful, will make a small impact on the tech industry, rather than just reporting on it (like he does now).
I think Arrington is vastly overestimating the number of people who will actually buy a CrunchPad. It will cost more than $300, be too big to be portable, but too crippled (no keyboard, no OS, no file storage, etc.) to be anything more than a toy.
he has more than 3.2 million people subscribing to the techcrunch rss feed, so the actual number of people who read techcrunch is huge. And the crunchpad will profit from the network effect.
people said the same thing about ipod, iphone and other apple products, as long as you have a following, you can sell anything at any price
I doubt the kind of following Apple has - people spending thousands of dollars on its products, sticking with them even when their market share was marginal etc - is comparable to people regularly reading a blog.
So far, other "A list" web celebs ventures have shown that, after the initial hype, they succeed or fail based on their product's worth.
I'm not saying this isn't so -- but reading this kind of statement always reminds me of the many entrepreneurs that do end up being successful despite everyone saying it would never work.
Even if it is less than $300, how much less? I can have netbook for less than $400...
I like the idea of CrunchPad, but still for the future I am thinking about paying more and buy a netbook with touchscreen - then the only advantage of CrunchPad I can think of is a shorter boot time.
Really like the [obvious?] crunchpad product. I really expect a new generation of products cloning iPhones, Kindles because Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia are sleeping under its comfort zones. Cheers to ASUS too!
Agreed, however, I think everyone could see instantly that seesmic was a dud. As most can see that the Crunchpad is a dud. IMHO the idea of the Crunchpad is something that has already been tried many many times before, with the net result that there simply isn't a large market for such devices.
I think the point is that for every wildly successful company out there, there was surely an early group of naysayers who could see instantly that it was a dud.
Arrington might fail here, but you have to give the guy a lot of credit for how he has moved forward on this thing.
I don't think this is that clearly a dud. If it comes in at a decent price point and has a convenient charging stand I could easily see one in my living room.
I think it's more likely that the market wasn't ready for such a thing.
Like netbooks, which were not possible at a price point that made them attractive to consumers until a year and a half ago, when they suddenly emerged as a market category.
But hey, the great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you are responsible for estimating the market conditions and executing credibly.
Why is this comment downvotted so much? I happen to believe that it's the key to the question. People just don't realize the buying power of Apple.
If you can build the CrunchPad for $200, you'd have a huge success. If you build it for $500, it's dead on arrival. If it has the next gen CPU, it's a success. If it runs with last year low power CPU, it's dead.
Plus you need great software on top of course, but the hardware can kill you.
I doubt TechCrunch has the expertise to make this thing as good as say, the Kindle. I know people who work at Amazon, and that company has really good engineers. I can't imagine TechCrunch does.
Arrington is just a Jeff Bezos wannabe, but he's missing the point. He thinks hardware+media=money. But it needs to be good hardware!
The Kindle is vastly more complex than the Crunchpad. EInk, DRM store, mobile network hardware, all sorts.
The crunchpad is basically a laptop without a keyboard, a touch screen and some custom Linux software. It's really not that complex. Most of it is just assembling components and writing some relatively straightforward software, unless I'm missing something?
Say what you like about him, but Arrington is doggedly going after this thing...
The hardware design is being outsourced to a company specializing in it. IMHO it has a better chance of being better designed than kindle. By the way, Amazon has good software engineers. I don't know if they even have hardware engineers on their payroll. So arrington and amazon are kind of on equal footing on talent [except for the money that can be pumped into development].
