Feb262009
Kindle and Cambridge’s E-Ink
Filed under General by david brooks at 5:04 pm
Xconomy has a good interview with the president of E-Ink, the Cambridge, Mass. firm that makes the “electronic ink” used in Kindle2 and Sony’s Reader. (It’s in Cambridge because most of the founders met at MIT; that’s why cities love to have good schools.) It’s a good piece, not very technical but valuable for those who dream of building a start-up. This paragraph in particular struck me:
We understood that it was probably going to take two years to make something that people wanted to buy… But what we didn’t see in the beginning … was that it would take another two years to go from something that looked good to something that would look good for many years under all operating conditions—in other words, to achieve stability and robustness. And then it would take another two years to get something that you could reproducibly manufacture, at an affordable cost point.
ADDENDUM: Hearst publishing, which was an early investor in E-Ink, says it plans to produce a sort of super-Kindle to display magazines, according to this report.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
That sounds about right. Sometimes a company will have a great product, but until it achieves what I call critical mass, it can stumble along for several years and then be overcome by another company with a similar product. The second company won't have the same entrenched ideas and obsolete production equipment.
Sometimes a company is out of business and not even know it. It's a sad sight to watch a business circling around the drain but bravely hanging on til the inevitable end.
Having been involved in a few of these, I have some sympathy. I sure hope E-Ink proves to be a success.