Lessons From Failure
Rafe Needleman's latest column talks about the efforts of two different Swedish handset makers to push the boundaries of how mobile phones are made. He starts off with an anecdote about how the Swedes have a museum dedicated to one of their biggest failures: the sinking of the Vasa. The ship sank after the king kept asking the shipbuilders to add additional features. However, he points out that after that wreck, plenty of other ships figured out how to sail with those features included. He's afraid the same thing is going to happen to Ericsson's much hyped P800. He believes it has too many features that aren't quite ready for primetime, yet. The other company in the article is a new handset maker, Neonode, who believes that handset production is being separated from phone software creation, allowing the industry to evolve more like the PC industry. If that's the case, it appears Neonode wants to be the Dell of the handset industry: the big brand that everybody wants.
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