Building Good Hardware (is Harder Than it Looks)

Building good hardware is not a trivial undertaking. We’ve all seen it time and time again as new companies go through the throes of taking a great concept all the way through the many layers of design and development, to a final shipping product (unfortunately, not always in quantity). We saw this play out for Red Digital Cinema, with their months of revised shipping target dates and hardware changes. Sony dealt with it when they had to fix widespread lens issues shortly after the EX1 launch. Even the mighty Apple has faltered recently with the somewhat buggy launch of the iPhone 3G revision. I’ll say it again; building good hardware is not an easy task. Even while companies miss the mark, what’s is interesting to me is that rarely is the original idea a bad one. In this article I’d like to take a look at several recent product launches from “indie-centric” companies. I’ll also discuss the reservations and deposits business model, a practice that seems to be largely constrained to these small businesses. I’ll sometimes casually refer to this as the “Red-servations” model of business. Obviously the concept of taking reservations in advance wasn’t innovated by Red Digital Cinema, but they really put it on the map with the development of the Red One camera. Read on…

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