Pale Blue Ego;167910 Wrote: > I think you've got 2 main groups of customers here. The first, and > probably largest, are geeks who love music. <snip> > > The second group are primarily music lovers and audiophiles. <snip> > > Notice the conspicuous absence of Joe Blow in this picture? Joe > probably isn't aware of the music server concept.<snip> > > The greatest potential for expanding the Squeezebox market is from the > iPod crowd. They have computers and they "get it" that music is just > bits and it's cool to carry around your whole collection. The problem, > for Slim Devices, is that this group is being served by the many audio > systems that now feature an iPod dock. That makes it easy to pop your > iPod into your home or portable stereo, and for many people, that will > be all they'll ever need or want. The iPod is their home music > server. > > Slim Devices is a viable solution for people who have in some way > "outgrown" their iPods. Either they have a lot more music than even > the largest iPod will hold, or they realize that lossy files don't > sound very good on a decent home stereo. At this point, the customer > begins to resemble one or both of your core customers - the geek or the > audiophile. I think that's a great analysis PBE. But I'm not completely convinced about the convergence of the iPod-heads to the geek/audiophile camps. I can see them gravitating to the SB without becoming complete geeks or audiophiles.
Capacity and sound quality are certainly two factors that would encourage migration to SBs, but there's also the conveniences of having the music and the playback *control* distributed throughout the house or flat (and it really helps that the control is readable from across the room). I have not done very well in my SB proseltyzing/demo-ing -- I get a lot of blank looks. For those that get the concept, I almost always lose them when I get to the NAS that runs slimserver and holds the music library. Whether they completely get it or not, one of the biggest selling points that does seem to click is having access to your collection anywhere in the house, as long as you put an SB there. The biggest mistake I made when I bought my first SB a little over a year ago was not taking advantage of the "$100 off when you buy 2 SBs" deal, because I now own 3 SBs and am planning on a 4th. The second selling point that gets some people, especially those who have a lot of their collections on a PC/Mac is having control in the listening room. This has especially resonated with friends using AirTunes, who have gotten weary of having to get up and go to the computer (like a geek!) to skip/add/delete a track in the playlist. Noticing the huge array of iPod accessories that Logitech sells, they clearly understand this market far better than I do. Maybe a SqueezeBoomBox that also has an iPod dock is a way to draw them in, while at the same time satisfying a frequent request of the already-converted? -- aubuti ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31324 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
