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I have a rather unsentimental perspective on my books, acquired during my first post-publishing celebration. One well-meaning friend held up the 560-page tome and gushed, "Gosh, Jannie, you must be very proud when you look at that book."
"Actually, Erika," I said, "when I look at that book, three months after my last submission to the publisher, all I see is a skinny ATM card." And my roylaty statements are hardly the only evidence that the market for corporate and consumer digital video has never been all that hot.
We've seen three waves seeking to crack open this prosumer/ consumer marketplace to date. The first wave of ISA boards in 1994-1995 failed because computers were underpowered and the video looked awful. The second wave of PCI-based boards in 1996-1997 hoped to leverage the streaming video market, but also failed miserably because the video looked awful. The third wave was parallel port MPEG-1 encoders, which achieved some success, but was too little, too late.
Vendors in these waves employed a push strategy-we push these products out there, folks will buy them. They pushed and shoved and advertised to no avail, because push strategies only work when they address pent-up demand. A great example is the market for sub-$1,000 PCs, now growing like a weed after uncovering demand for email, Web...