User Power
Value/Post Ratio
143%
- Apr 17, 2018
- 950
- 1,356
I think the business risks of your idea are even bigger than the technical challenges.
If your smart watch would sell to the upper half of the market, you'll have to outperform Apple at convincing people that you have a really great, feature-packed, super cool smart watch with lots of third party software available.
If your smart watch runs Android, you have to have something very clearly superior, and sustainably so, to the best from companies like Samsung; or, something dirt cheap but good enough, that won't be undercut by other bottom feedesr doing a search on Alibaba.
If you don't run Android, you have a chicken and egg problem of getting an app ecosystem going. Taizen, Blackberry OS, and Windows Mobile all failed to get traction in the far bigger market of smart phones, all of these backed by multibillion dollar companies. How will you get people to make so much software for your new, incompatible with everything watch so that people will buy it?
Is there any way you could make an accessory that works with Apple or Android watches, instead of the watch itself? An accessory that captures some kind of useful or fun or interesting data, uploads it the cloud, and gives people something to show off on Facebook and Twitter? That seems to me like a far less risky venture than trying to get a new type of smartwatch into sustainable profit territory.
This advice comes from someone who ran a software development team inside a Fortune 500 hardware company, a company that decided they didn't want to be in that software business any more. EVERYONE in the industry who saw my boss's pitches, agreed we had by far the coolest, most unique, most advanced technology concepts in the industry. Despite that, NO sales were every made of the system!!! The hardware giant spun off the software division of hundreds of people and put millions of dollars of funding into the new company. The instant the corporate split was done, the owners of the new company shut down everything from the parent company but kept the money! I was one of the first booted out the door! That was a life lesson that COOL is not enough unless it meets a true, proven demand and has a great marketing plan!
If your smart watch would sell to the upper half of the market, you'll have to outperform Apple at convincing people that you have a really great, feature-packed, super cool smart watch with lots of third party software available.
If your smart watch runs Android, you have to have something very clearly superior, and sustainably so, to the best from companies like Samsung; or, something dirt cheap but good enough, that won't be undercut by other bottom feedesr doing a search on Alibaba.
If you don't run Android, you have a chicken and egg problem of getting an app ecosystem going. Taizen, Blackberry OS, and Windows Mobile all failed to get traction in the far bigger market of smart phones, all of these backed by multibillion dollar companies. How will you get people to make so much software for your new, incompatible with everything watch so that people will buy it?
Is there any way you could make an accessory that works with Apple or Android watches, instead of the watch itself? An accessory that captures some kind of useful or fun or interesting data, uploads it the cloud, and gives people something to show off on Facebook and Twitter? That seems to me like a far less risky venture than trying to get a new type of smartwatch into sustainable profit territory.
This advice comes from someone who ran a software development team inside a Fortune 500 hardware company, a company that decided they didn't want to be in that software business any more. EVERYONE in the industry who saw my boss's pitches, agreed we had by far the coolest, most unique, most advanced technology concepts in the industry. Despite that, NO sales were every made of the system!!! The hardware giant spun off the software division of hundreds of people and put millions of dollars of funding into the new company. The instant the corporate split was done, the owners of the new company shut down everything from the parent company but kept the money! I was one of the first booted out the door! That was a life lesson that COOL is not enough unless it meets a true, proven demand and has a great marketing plan!