A Friday Look into the "Digital Home Solution"

[James Fee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/12/digital_home_survey/' target='_blank'>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/12/digital_home_survey/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Accenture asked punters in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan what was stopping them from buying "digital home solutions". Surprisingly it wasn't embarrasment at asking for a "digital home solution" but the expense that put people off. The survey offered four possible "homes of the future" - home entertainment, home healthcare, home management and virtual office - and refreshingly a majority were interested in none of them. Entertainment came out top with 42 per cent expressing a strong interest, falling to 28 per cent interested in home management or virtual office."</i><br /><br />Yea it is Friday, but who would have thought that the cost of technology would be expensive. I'd have an automatic kitty box if it didn't cost so much money. Heck I could hook it up to send me instant messages when the cat poops (can I say poop at DMT?). Either way, I'm glad to see that consulting companies are spending money to keep the economy afloat. I'd hate to think of the recession that would happen if they stopped and then we'd be even farther away from a digital home solution.

[Felix Torres]

Okay, since its friday and just hours before Potterday...

Have you considered that often the biggest barriers to technology adoption are *not* cost-related at all?
- 50% of US households still don't have home PCs.
- Lots of folks who can afford HDTVs haven't done so for lack or content.
- Lots of folks who need MPE PCs don't even know what they do and make do with business-grade boxes instead...

Whether they call it that or not, everybody does cost-benefit analysis before adopting a new technology.
For some people, the analysis is as simple as:
"ohhh, pretty.... Me want!"
Others just shrug off everything this side of a free instant cure for cancer and old age.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

Want a examples of technologies that don't get adopted bespite being ridiculously cheap?

Try this one:

This week, I read somewhere that AMAZON.COM is offering a package deal for the full set of Penguin classics (something like a thousand classic books, all out of copyright) for the bargain prce of about $8000.

Now, for $16 bucks, you can get a DVD set with all those books and a whole lot more; a full 12,000 classic books (and a whole lotta pulps, too).
And you can get them in any computerreadable format or in a variety of ebook-readable formats.
For $130 you can get a very good dedicated ebook reader with outdoor-readable screen, rechargeable 20+ hour batteries, light weight, about the size of a small hardcover book.

$8000 versus $150.

Wanna bet which one has higher sales?

So, yeah, Accenture is trying to figure out what the barriers to adoption are.
It might be that the feature set and user interfaces are absolutely perfect and that people would take to the tech like a fish to water if only the price were right...
But of course, getting the price right and getting all the other issues perfect is hardly trivial, is it?

I'm sure we can all come up with all sorts of media technologies that are *not* being adopted by vast amounts of the population for one reason or another.

And while a lot of people may say it is price, the more common answer is likely to be *perceived* value, ignorance (they may not even know the product exists), inertia, or just plain fear of the unfamiliar.

So you can be sure that if you were to read the fine print and sift through the full report they developed, whoever paid for the study will at least have some verifiable data to act on.

That's gotta be worth something...

Now to find a way to kill the next 12 hours or so... ;-)