21A - Reading Reflection No. 2

I read "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution" by Chris Anderson.

1. The general theme or argument of the book was that we are all makers. With the technology that we have available to us at the touch of a button now, we are able to do so much more ourselves which has transformed the way new ideas are turned into reality. This technology is what has changed the inventor into the entrepreneur.
2. This book connected with what we are learning in class because it harped on how it is unnecessary to get a patent before creating a product and that when people copy you, it is a form of competition not piracy. These are two things that we have talked about in class and I found it very interesting to read about them and hear the same things from someone else as well.
3. I think based on this book, a good exercise for the class would be to go onto a crowdsourcing website such as Kickstarter, and have the students find ideas like theirs and see how much money they have raised as well as the comments that are posted about the product. Then they could do a write-up to talk about how closely related this product is to their own product and how seeing the other products and the amount of money that it raised helped them to modify their idea or if it solidified their idea more.
4. The biggest thing that surprised me was when it said that the best price for a new product is "2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers." (106) This concept totally caught me off guard because I though most companies would try and price low to cover their costs. It seems as though this strategy would make the products cost astronomical amounts and would make it much harder for the companies to make money to cover their costs. However, the many companies that it talked about later had adopted this strategy and were doing very well. I think as the consumer, we are sometimes unaware of how cheap it is to manufacture a product so when it says 2.3x that amount, it is not that much because it started out way lower than we thought.