Messages

1

Hardware Mods / 'self Powered' Hdds And Zaurus

« on: March 06, 2006, 04:07:06 am »

Took a quick look at your drive.  looks good, but are the batteries easily replaceable, more or less standard, or are they seriously built in?  I ask because I'd hope the drive outlived the battery.
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The battery is not replaceable without the use of a soldering iron   .

Mark

2

C1000/3x00 General discussions / User Guide Online

« on: October 13, 2005, 06:09:34 am »

"We know you'll be itching to start playing with your new toy - sorry, device - so we'll be brief. If you do nothing else with this User Guide, we suggest you at least do the following:"

Hope that helps a little.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=99045\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

It does, thanks.

Mark

3

C1000/3x00 General discussions / User Guide Online

« on: October 10, 2005, 06:37:28 am »

Agreed...

There are two possible markets:

1. those that don't want the support
2. those that do want the support

but maybe there's also a third - people that want the support but don't want to
pay for it - do they belong to group 1 or 2? (This can be a problem with segments - they're
rarely clean cut - they overlap and people swap between them)

Nevertheless let's assume in this instance that the segments behave
themselves  and they fall into the two groups, so we should target the
second, get the first onside...so what's a good way of doing that?

Our thought process at the time was:
- Focus our efforts on usability - like polito, we liked the Zaurus, thought
it looked cool, but felt it needed 'finishing' to grow the market. And (as
we can all appreciate) the finishing work can sometimes be the really
time-consuming stuff...the 20% of the functionality that takes 80% of the
time.
- And we also needed to make the usability emphasis tangible for the people
that are looking for support by providing something on the site - our
initial thought was the user manual which would lead people into looking at
us.
- One of the problems with this is that the people who don't want the
support can still get it ..online. But (so the argument goes with the two
segments) of course they don't need support so what does it matter? So
really we show the guys that do need support that we've added some value to
the box (e.g. user manual) and this helps differentiate us from other
resellers. And if by chance the odd one or two from the 'don't want support
group' use the online manual...great..we'll get the word of mouth support.
- At some point you have to draw a line in terms of how much you make
available for free..the PDF seemed another step (although over time the
value changes, and we can see a point when the PDF gets made available for
free as a new piece of value is added..a timing thing as the market becomes
more sophisticated and we get to support more R&D).

Do you think the thought process is flawed?

At the time - another approach we thought about was to keep the things we're
doing inside the company's 'walled garden' and offer to build a customer's
machine for a fee and provide a hardback user manual as part of that
package. But in this case we're providing little back to the community.

As I understand it, this has some similarities with the EmperorLinux model -
but given the price of the device, our industry positioning and possible
adverse word of mouth...it wasn't appropriate for Fig Labs.

I guess this is a common issue in Open Source (even if the Sharp ROM isn't
quite as open as we'd like): how to cover the costs of upfront R&D effort,
make the code freely available..but not free.


Genuinely interested in your thoughts and thanks for giving your opinion.

Mark

4

C1000/3x00 General discussions / User Guide Online

« on: October 07, 2005, 05:17:24 pm »

Here's the challenge

We're trying to make a business from selling the Zaurus. The problem we face is that we start with one hand tied behind our back - namely we can't possibly compete on price with purchasing direct from Japan, so how can we compete with these guys?

Our approach is to improve the product, giving our customers a better user experience. These ehancements are currently:

1. Providing our customers with a good, responsive and helpful service.
2. Providing a good user manual and the best English conversion we possibly can (both of these have taken a lot of time and effort to date and we're still working at them).

We are also in the process of enhancing some elements of the software that we think are not as good as they could be. But today all we have to compete with a cheaper import from Japan is customer service (which you don't know about until you've bought from us) and a better English conversion and manual.

We are devotees of Linux, open source contributors and very sensitive to issues of sharing with the community - it was for these reasons that we made the user manual available on-line in the first instance (we could have chosen not to do this at all, but we felt it was appropriate to).

Over time we'd like to think we would have more differentiators and consequently would be able to share more with the community.

If you can think of a better way to make this a sustainable business then we would be genuinely happy to hear it.

Best regards

Mark

5

C1000/3x00 General discussions / User Guide Online

« on: October 07, 2005, 04:58:17 am »

Public offer here: How about some official code-sharing between us?
This will be an improvement for you, us and our customers.

Marc, Robert,

Our objective is to make the most usable and useful Zaurus possible for our customers - both in terms of software and user-guide, so we welcome your offer.

We'll contact you to see what we can do together.

Thanks

Mark