The McBournie Minute: Early adoption always a bad idea

There are a lot of people out there that just have to have the latest and greatest thing. They have to have the coolest new gadgets as soon as they are willing to wait in line for hours just to be among the first to get it. These people have never really made that much sense to me.

It just doesn’t pay to be an early adopter. Remember everyone who bought the first copies of Windows Vista? Aside from all of the bugs that have been mostly fixed in the past year, have you heard anyone who actually likes the operating system? Even so, Microsoft announced last week it would take the unprecedented step of slashing prices on versions of Vista. This means that if you waited, you could get the same OS for less cash.

Video game consoles are much the same way. You wait a few months and the prices drop. In Xbox 360’s case, the price drop was joined by the release of a more advanced model. iPhone early adopters were upset when Apple slashed the prices on their products only a couple months after the release of the phone thingy.

This now also applies to people who got HD DVD and began upgrading their movie collection. Now that Toshiba has pulled production on HD DVD, Blu-ray (not “blurry”) discs have won the day. Most people waited on this one and it looks like it’s going to pay off, that is of course until the next format comes along in a few years. It’s only a matter of time.

My point is this: when it comes to adopting technology, it might be best to think of it as a child, and wait until it’s a few years old before picking it up. This way, all of the kinks, toilet training, tantrums and language-teaching are already out of the way. You have an easy-to-manage version that has a lot of potential. That is, of course, if you don’t mind taking care of someone else’s kid.