Personally I think the Touch, Radio, and Duet were all mistakes. I consider the Boom the last of the "true" Squeezeboxen. All the LCD-screen devices are hard to read, sluggish to operate, and introduce a level of interface fussiness that was wonderfully missing in all the VFD-based Squeezeboxes. Not only that, but as the devices got less "Slim" it seems reliability went down. It's a tough product to sell to the mass-market. It's fantastically capable, but we all know it's a little fussy. I think it's probably been a tech support nightmare for them. So now they're trying to market things like the Radio to the mass-market who may not buy it because they compare it against other internet radios which are cheaper, but even if they do buy it may then be overwhelmed and frustrated by the relative complexity of the device and some of the bugs that exist as a result of the software supporting such a large and diverse ecosystem. I don't think it's sustainable.
It's hard to know what would have happened if Logitech hadn't come along. Time and technology continues to march on, and things like iPhones and iPads have certainly changed the landscape irreversibly. Slim Devices may have made many of the same missteps regardless of whether or not Logitech ever acquired them. But that said, there was a certain "special-ness" around Slim Devices that has slowly evaporated ever since they were acquired. This was partially the result of a series of product introductions that were a meaningful departure from the previous paradigm (and were, as I argue above, weaker products). Not only that, but we all love a certain feeling of "exclusivity"; the Slim Devices name provided that, Logitech doesn't (especially important since a large portion of the Slim Devices fan-base consisted of "audiophiles"). Those things, combined with the fact that the community was now being asked to contribute code and effort back to a huge multinational company meant that overall community enthusiasm and developer support for the products waned. And that's the crux of it. Aside from any individual mis-steps that may have been made, Logitech was never set up to be able to foster the kind of enthusiast community that drove Slim Devices to success in the first place. They tried, and they did some things right (keeping Sean and Dean and Andy and others on for a while) but customer service struggled and I suspect this niche product could never drive enough sales for them to justify the level of involvement required. -- azinck3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ azinck3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3967 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92232 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
