Since several people have asked the same question, "how can you possibly expect to succeed where others have failed in the same endeavor?", I thought I would respond with my thinking in this area. Believe it or not, I had considered it. :-) Here are my thoughts:

1. No software development is required. There is production NRE and some design work to copy and modify (for manufacture) the engineering of the empeg hardware, but no software development would be necessary. This results in hugely decreased time to market and R&D expense. License agreements can be structured to pay royalties on a per unit sold basis.

2. The prices on the requisite hardware have dropped significantly since the empeg's introduction something like 3 years ago. This is a major factor. 20GB laptop drives can be had for under $75 bought at retail one at a time. 30GB drives are under a hundred. Sure, we all want 120GB (160GB if you're Grzelak), but most of us *bought* 20GB empegs or less.

3. The market is more ready for something like this than it was 3 years ago.

4. Basically, the hard work is done. A new company can come in and "stand on the shoulders of giants" without having to make all of the investments that the giants did. No debt. This is done all the time. The Koreans are absolute experts at it.

Yes, I know the empeg team looked at mass manufacture. Yes, I respect their efforts tremendously and I don't mean to diminish them. However, its a high tech product with high tech components. Things change very quickly and it is literally a different world wrto the market, the components, and even the manufacture.

I have worked with good engineers who specialize in manufacturing and it is a sight to behold. They see the world differently than the people who invent the products. It's fascinating. Some of the best are from Korea now.

As an aside, have any of you heard of the "World Skills Competition"? It's pretty cool. The Europeans and Americans get whomped by the Asians in pretty much all of the manufacturing technology areas...

The question of whether the empeg is something that the masses would embrace at *any* price is a good question. Was it really price that held back empeg adoption, or is it that the target market is people who think its cool to run httpd on their car stereo -- which I would guess is a small (but fun) group of "extremely eccentric, cubical dwelling engineer[s]" (Grzelak).

Anyhow, that's my $.02. Things change...

Jim