Comments on: The new consumer, first, king, now hacker?

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:17:32 +0000

I have a friend who has an Xbox with a Wi-Fi Card and a 250gig hard drive. Not only does it have all his games on it, but it acts as a media server for his entire 2000+ CD collection. What’s funny is this is Microsoft’s vision of the future of Xbox. My friend just didn’t want to wait for MS to build it. So I guess there is consumer group in front of early adopter. Early Adaptors.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:42:02 +0000

These kinds of generalizations make me nervous. It seems to me that the earliest stages of the product cycle are at least as much dominated by hacker-consumers as the later ones. Think about ham radio, early PCs, hi-fi systems, early automobiles, etc. In each case, only a fairly sophisticated user could even handle the product, and there was lots of hacking and trading of intormation and tips. It’s also clear that delivering a foolproof and aesthetic experience often involves giving up some modularity and hackability–that’s why Apple’s stuff is both pleasing and hard to hack.

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 14:09:53 +0000

Steve: Thanks for the details. I heard somewhere that Shepard Fairey is now a brand for hire. So much for his outlaw status! Best, Grant

Gabriel: Thanks. Yeah, you would think open source would be the way of encouraging, allowing consumers to adapt the technology (or the brand) for their own purposes. The first example I remember of this was a modest but interesting one. When they built Regenstein library at the University of Chicago, they waited to see where would people would approach the library before installing the sidewalks. In any case, open source allows the consumer to customize and as long as corporations are a step behind consumer expectation, this has to be the way to stay in touch. Still, lots of corporations will insist on closed source and this will make open source a competitive advantage for players with their wits about them. Thanks, Grant

By: Gabriel Rossman

Gabriel Rossman — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:25:40 +0000

It’s interesting that the basic design can facilitate or hinder hacking. In software this is obviously the main reason for Half-Life’s success, but I wonder how many hardware products owe their popularity to a tinker-friendly design.

I remember reading about an inventor who made insect robots that worked by direct stimulus response but when he took the design to toy companies they insisted on replacing his direct sensor-motor connections with a microchip, to make reverse engineering more difficult. On the one hand, you have something like a tivo, where it uses off the shelf parts and open source software.

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 23:57:30 +0000

Check out http://www.streetmemes.com/

The story of how Shepard Fairey created the various Andre memes (the first was the deliberately nonsensical “Andre the Giant Has a Posse”) is pretty cool, there’s a great short film at http://www.obeygiant.com/merch-videos02.html (I don’t know if you can watch it or just purchase it) that tracks some of the earliest days. I quite enjoy spotting the corruptions and evolutions of it I find whenever I travel (I have a photo of Andre Agassi Has a Posse from Tokyo, for example).