The Perils Of Being An Early Adopter

HP recently managed a couple of firsts in the Australian marketplace. It launched the TouchPad, a tablet competitor to the lots of Android tablets & Apple's overachieving iPad, & in doing so launched the first gizmo walking WebOS onto the Australian marketplace. WebOS was an operating method originally developed by Palm -- you may recall the PalmPilot, precursor to today's wave of smartphones -- & snapped up by HP last year for what was going to be a variety of rings & tablet devices. The rings seldom officially made it to Australian shores, but the $499/$599 (16/32GB) TouchPad would have been the first taste of WebOS for lots of consumers. It was officially launched through Harvey Norman with a blitz of promotion, & apparently within days around 1200 TouchPads were sold; not a bad result for a brand spanking new entrant in the competitive tablet space.

Then on the fourth day after its Australian launch, HP -- a US based firm -- announced it was ceasing all development in WebOS hardware worldwide, effectively killing off the Touchpad line. In the US this led to the remaining stock, which hadn't been selling, shifting out of stores at US$99/$149 respectively, which was something of a bargain. Locally, Harvey Norman announced it'd offer refunds to any TouchPad customer who wanted.

I have seen products fail to succeed locally, but seldom die that fast. While there is a happy ending for those purchasers in that they were offered refunds in the event that they wanted, it does point to one of the perils of early adoption of expertise. There is a positive chilled factor in having new expertise first, in the event you can take advantage of its features first. I attended the launch of the Apple iPhone where hundreds & hundreds of customers lined up outside Telstra, Optus & Vodafone/Three stores for the privilege of being early adopters. That is as much a fashion statement as a desire to have new features first, but it is still true that there can be benefits -- as long as you avoid the pitfalls.

Early adopters must deal with all the things that go wrong first, whether that is an application error that makes things work unpredictably, or a stray or poorly built tiny small tiny little bit of hardware that overheats, undercharges or outright explodes -- although thankfully that latter case is remarkably rare.

You are also stung with the financial cost of being an early adopter; in the case of the TouchPad in Australia that led to refunds, but while at $499/$599 HP was having trouble selling the TouchPad in the US, at $99/$149 they sold out immediately. Prices on expertise drop in a comparatively regular pattern, & often the best value you can get from expertise is fundamentally to have a tiny patience.