JJZolx wrote: 
> Unfortunately, they inherited (bought, actually) an ecosystem that was
> extremely expensive to maintain, and way more rickety than they'd hoped.
Funny that. I've never had any reliability problems with any version of
SlimServer/SqueezeCenter/LMS. I've run various incarnations on FreeBSD,
Win2000, Ubuntu and Fedora. It always just worked. So I can't understand
where you get your idea of "rickety" from.

Or perhaps you're speaking in terms of the development and support
effort required. I guess that's possible, but I don't have any inside
knowledge of what their software guys had to deal with.

JJZolx wrote: 
> Forensically, their problem was that they hired a lot of guys who
> understood the hardware, audio and networking sides of things, but they
> pretty thoroughly fucked up the data modeling and (to a lesser extent)
> the user interface.
Seems to me that what Logitech actually did was see that there might be
money to be made from the streaming audio market, and so took a punt on
buying a semi-mature technology to try and enter that marketplace. It
only cost what for them was petty cash.

Unfortunately they never understood the Slim Devices vision so had no
idea where to take things. Everyone seems to think that in hardware
terms the Touch was the crowning glory, but it was the beginning of the
end - a "non-slim Slim Device", as it were. By trying to put some of the
intelligence into the player, they completely missed the point of how
the ecosystem was supposed to work. Luckily for customers who did
understand the system, they could ignore the cut-down server they tried
to put on the Touch and just use it as a player. But it was presented to
the mass market as an all-in-one solution, and that just didn't work.

What Logitech should have done is release some sort of LMS appliance so
they could sell a turnkey server and stick with genuinely slim players.
If they couldn't even figure out how to do that, they could have bought
Vortexbox for much less than they paid for Slim Devices.

JJZolx wrote: 
> If Logitech had immediately made the decision to port the software to a
> native Windows application and knocked out a device for $99, I guarantee
> the Squeezebox would still be alive today.
Perhaps something would still be alive, but it wouldn't be much like the
Squeezebox system we know and love.



Transporter -> ATC SCM100A
------------------------------------------------------------------------
cliveb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=348
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=104431

_______________________________________________
discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Reply via email to