It's not pretty to see this happening to what is certainly a classic and influential device but even the Playbook, as unique as it is, won't change customers' perceptions of RIM.
But the most influential device of the year was the mobile phone, which is now used for 42% of visits to the John Lewis website, up from 17% a year ago.
But smartphones will continue to be the more influential device, Deloitte says.
From 1955 to 1970, he held surgical posts at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he led a team that devised many influential devices with support from the National Institutes of Health, including an electronic heart-lung machine and a radio transmitter that allowed paralyzed patients to empty their bladders.
After he left Commodore, Tramiel purchased Atari in 1984, though its most influential devices were already behind it.
Although many companies already sell competing products, experts note that Apple has a history of entering sectors relatively late and then changing their direction with influential devices of its own.
It is likely too that surgeons' and anaesthetists' preferences for particular pressure-relieving devices may be an influential factor in use of particular devices.
Throughout his career, Frutiger also studied graphical symbols and devices, and wrote an influential book on the subject, Der Mensch und Seine Zeichen (1978, published in English in 1998 as Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning).
Also during this period, with colleagues at the MITRE Corporation he published an influential article examining the implications of novel nanoelectronic devices for computing.
As Congress considers reauthorizing a law that sets the fees for medical device makers, venture capitalists are emerging as an influential ally of companies eager for a quicker regulatory process.
