3 ms·
On the topic of startups, the trajectory of the sales graph of aibos is interesting and worth comparing to recent techno-gadget fads. The first 3K took twenty
by VLM 12y ago
On the topic of startups, the trajectory of the sales graph of aibos is interesting and worth comparing to recent techno-gadget fads.
The first 3K took twenty minutes to sell. The next 150K took six years... Sales never exceeded 1 in 1000 of the countries population.
- Digit-Al 12y agoI guess that's why they discontinued them. Whilst they were very popular with those who owned them, I guess they never sold enough to be profitable compared to their more core products.
- ctdonath 12y agoHaving one, methinks two factors applied (other than the real-dog incident I posted above) considering the $3000 price tag: self-recharging is a must, and it was hard to get a mental handle on what/why it was actually doing. Having to find it (after wandering for a couple hours), pick it up, and put it on the charger gets old; later models would return to the charger on its own, but by then interest had waned. Watching it frolic was amusing, but you'd get this odd sense that it was more deliberate than you could grasp - leaving you with a nagging "but what's it doing?" feeling. Watching it look at a Christmas tree was hysterical though. Head would shake all around as it tried to parse the visual cues of an unexpectedly large number of small bright lights.