Makers 05 - Cory Doctorow

" Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.

“Please,” he said, “I invented these things but there aren’t a million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half a million tops, total.

Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.

Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.

What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. Seniors’ homes.

The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.

They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition is great new for you and me, because it’s already driven the price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, before the margin disappears altogether—and that’s also good news for you and me.

“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Suzanne’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.

“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.

On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.

“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (”They fucking pay me to do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.

“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”

Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”"

4 out of 5

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