Sounds like high school me buying a zen creative and a zune because they were "better than iPods" and hating iPhones when they came out because physical keyboards would always be superior.

If the correlation turns out accurate, that would explain why marketers use every possible tactics to collect data about who we are and what we purchase, as it could give them an indicator of which product will fail. Such profiling is already done for targeted advertising, although this way it means buyers are also finely categorized including data about their political orientation and other sensitive aspects of their life.

ps. I like a lot Cory Doctorow's articles; also Boing Boing was among my favorite sites in the early 2k; I'm saddened to see what it has become today: mostly a shop for overpriced crap. Suffice to say that after noticing my account was terminated during my long hospitalization in late 2020 with no warnings given, I didn't create another and removed the site from my bookmarks.

The Zune was one of the nicest pieces of tech I've ever owned, and nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise.

You can count me in that group. I'm that guy who bought weird Toshiba and Archos MP3 players because they supported USB mass storage. I am now buying a Unihertz Pocket, a QWERTY phone in 2022.

Thanks!

But:

> Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents.

Ouch...

> I thought Apple was cool in the 90s and that Microsoft was on to something in the 00s

It's not on my shelf of bad decisions anymore, but in '95 I though I was making the best possible purchase when I bought a Mac 6100 DOS Compatible... A Mac with a daughterboard that had a 486DX2 which ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and later Win95. (I paid $1200AUD for 3 8MB SIMMs for that, so the DOS board didn't;t have to share RAM with the Mac...)

What do you think the next big thing it? What product segments and companies look really promising?

Thought Iridium would really be a good investment. Same with the JAZ drive.