Two words: cell phones.

That is all,

Lark

Early adopters get screwed. Still not convinced? I’ll bet you are, but let me elaborate more, this time using the mp3 as an example.

I posted on twitter two days ago that I’ve never used, or even owned, a dual-layer dvdr disc. This is on my mind because I’m going to have to start using them in the near future, expanding my DVD authoring skills.

As I explained, I’ve never needed a DL DVDr. I’ve always bought the biggest USB drives I could find, and I use a media center PC to play movies, not a DVD player. This means I’ve never needed to burn 8GB on a disc, I could just throw it on a thumb drive, and I could play videos off the thumb drive on my television just fine.

However, looking at these thumb drives, I’m reminded of a rule of thumb, especially in regards to technology: Early adopters get screwed.

Of course I’ve been using hyperbole. Early adopters pay more at first, and get less convenient technology for that money, but they also reap the benefits of the most recent develpments. Hell, they’re partly responsible for the increase of technology.

There are no absolutes. Sometimes early adopters come out ahead. For instance, web domains. If you looked ahead and snagged mcrosoft.com, or nbc.com, etc, you probably made some nice cash on the re-sales.

Certain cars are worth more now than they were originally, but not many. A lot of old vinyl records could probably be sold for more than was originally paid for them, as could be said about anything nostalgiac.

And phone numbers. Try getting a phone number that spells anything nowadays. I just tried, with my Google Voice account. No luck. So if you’ve got a good one, congratulations.

Of course, the last people on the bandwagon, the people who sneered at the idea of the personal computer originally, can now afford with one week’s pay a laptop hundreds of times more powerful than those bulky first PCs.

There are some exceptions, but they’re few and far between. Then again, the benefit of early adoption is inherent. The commands, “cut,” and “paste”? Those terms used to refer to physical actions. When there were no word processors, you’d type on a typewriter, then white-out, cut, paste, and re-copy your documents. The first computers may have taken multiple floppy disks to hold one document, but they were way better than the alternative. Early adopters only seem to be getting screwed when looking back from the convenience of the present, never when contrasted against the only other options at the time. This is the way technology works, and it’s the way it always will be.

Lark