I think you've got 2 main groups of customers here. The first, and probably largest, are geeks who love music. They already have a network and a large collection of music files. They rarely have trouble setting up the Squeezebox and are willing to tinker with settings, plugins, nightly builds, and even raw code. They love the Squeezebox as a music playback device, but also as a geek toy.
The second group are primarily music lovers and audiophiles. They see the Squeezebox as a wonderful way to organize and playback a massive audio collection. They are extremely interested in sound quality. As a group they have a widely variable skill level as far as computers and networking; for some setting up EAC and FLAC will be the most difficult computer task they've ever attempted. But many audiophiles have a tinkerer's mentality and can usually get up to speed after absorbing the new concepts required. Notice the conspicuous absence of Joe Blow in this picture? Joe probably isn't aware of the music server concept. He knows about iPods and might even know someone who has one - but he probably doesn't have one himself. Forget about this guy. He probably doesn't have a DVD player either, preferring to watch old Monster Truck rallies on VHS. The greatest potential for expanding the Squeezebox market is from the iPod crowd. They have computers and they "get it" that music is just bits and it's cool to carry around your whole collection. The problem, for Slim Devices, is that this group is being served by the many audio systems that now feature an iPod dock. That makes it easy to pop your iPod into your home or portable stereo, and for many people, that will be all they'll ever need or want. The iPod is their home music server. Slim Devices is a viable solution for people who have in some way "outgrown" their iPods. Either they have a lot more music than even the largest iPod will hold, or they realize that lossy files don't sound very good on a decent home stereo. At this point, the customer begins to resemble one or both of your core customers - the geek or the audiophile. The idea of dedicated slimserver hardware is an intriguing one. A small, silent PC with enough horsepower to speedily run Slimserver and some kind of expandable storage would be a good start. But how pain-free could you make it? You're probably talking about a specialized version of Linux optimized to run Slimserver. But what about ripping and tagging? What about network shares? How do you update the server software and plugins? Solving these problems might go a long way toward offering a music server platform for "everyman" - but you'd also be in many ways limiting the flexibility that Slimserver currently offers. And you'd be opening whole new realms of customer support headaches. I will throw in a few feature requests for a next-generation Squeezebox (SB4): Full-width component with full-width display. I'm not talking about the 2 displays ala Transporter, but a single display that is double the width. This is the killer feature that will sell a lot of SB4s to current SB owners (though it might tick off current Transporter owners). A better DAC. The DAC in the SB3 is good, and the one in the Transporter is supposedly excellent. I'm not saying the Transporter DAC should go into the SB4 - that might bump the price too high - but with each hardware generation an effort should be made to find the best-sounding DAC in the price range. A linear power supply. There would be room inside a full-sized component for a larger and better power supply than the external switching supply of the SB3. Basically, I'm asking for SB4 to be "Transporter Lite" - an evolutionary step forward taking some of the Transporter features and putting them in a more reasonably-priced component. Say $500 or $600 tops. Of course if some of these advances could be incorporated in a $300 device, that's great, too. I'd like to see some kind of SD hardware remain reasonably-priced, even if that means continuing to sell the current SB3 along with a better, more expensive SB4. -- Pale Blue Ego ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pale Blue Ego's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=110 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31324 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
