The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Over the past few days, there have been a couple of items that sparked additional interest from me in the field of open-source hardware. Earlier, I pointed out that the choices and improvements made in an open-source environment lead to better products all around.

Shortly thereafter I came across an article in the McKinsey Quarterly where the venerable consultancy laid out three ways companies can win “by adopting distributed cocreation”:

• Capture value from the cocreated product or service itself by merchandising good ideas gleaned from the network
• Capture value by providing a complementary product or service
• Benefit indirectly through an enhanced brand or strategic position

Then yesterday, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch proposed an open-source web tablet with a target price of $200. It’s arguable whether that price is realistic, but the larger point is that this simple proposal immediately captured the imagination of a large number of folks — there were more than 600 comments on the post last time I checked.