How to Design a Hot Product

A nice essay by the creator of the Flip (via Pogue's column on the NYT).

Here's a snippet from Pogue's Blog:

When Cisco killed the beloved Flip camcorder a few months ago, a lot of people were shocked and upset—including me. It just seemed like such a ham-handed, thoughtless way to terminate an iconic, very popular gadget.

I continue to read, online and in newspapers, that Cisco killed the Flip camcorder because the writing was on the wall: smartphones now have video capability, so nobody needs a standalone gadget.

I’ve written before on the topic of single-purpose versus multipurpose gadgets. But today, here’s an especially articulate essay on this subject. It’s a guest post from Nasahn Sheppard, director of industrial design at Smart Design, the company that designed the Flip camcorder itself.

Read it fully on Pogue's Posts (the comments are interesting as well) [1].

URL[1]: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/how-to-design-a-hot-product/

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