Home Electronics Is a Fashion Business

As a customer, I've never fully appreciated the industrial design. I mean personally, as a buyer, not as a seller. The soul of an engineer inside me has always wanted function first and foremost. Leaving the form irrelevant. Fortunately Adam, my co-founder, is exactly at the opposite end of the scale. To the extent he finds it difficult to fully embrace our current F&Home system, just because it is ugly. Well, may be not that ugly but not very attractive looking physical form. So I have hard time pushing him the "eat our own dog food" mantra, especially when I see his wry face looking at what we have on the table today.

I say fortunately, because I do understand the industrial design matters a lot. We have fantastic team of design / partners working with us on the next generation design. It is hard to imagine a better company for the task. But I have to admit, I was a bit surprised last week, during a joint workshop, when I learned a flat, table-top form factor was no longer fashionable.

Apple seems to be the Versace of home gadgets, setting the trends. They have gone vertical, starting with the Mac Pro, and later with the latest Airport Extremes and Time Capsules. The crowd, in general, has not caught up (yet). TP-Link (personally I like a lot their approach to quality / design) is still horizontal. D-Link is sending out some harbingers, like the DIR-868L. Netgear tries their own but generally falls in line with other "horizontal-with-three-antennas" siblings. Sonos is catching up with the vertical trend too, with the Play:1.

What a pity the entire connected home hub category is still the old - fashioned horizontal. This may change by the next Christmas, as there are several rule - breaking designs going into production in 2014. I wonder how many owners of the current generation hubs will be upgrading just because the ones they have are no longer in vogue?