"For many firms good at low-cost electronics, the barrier to entry was simply too high," says Tony Milbourn of TTPCom, a British firm that designs and licenses hardware and software components for mobile phones.But the situation has changed in the last couple of years.
In my last post I claimed that the video game industry is the fastest growing industry on the planet and the world's newest mass medium routinely accessed by 72percentt of U.S. households, is representing a powerful economic sector involving capital, licensing, hardware, software, production, production tools, distribution and publishing -- and an ever-expanding universe of end users.
At HAXLR8R, Spark started off by making open source hardware and software, then a device-based subscription and then licensed both hardware and software.
"Then, we should have licensed our hardware and software to anyone that wanted them," he says.
In fact, T-Mobile licensed the hardware design from the BlackBerry's maker, though it substituted its own software.
In 1997 Hawkins sold and licensed the hardware business to Samsung Electronics and Matsushita for $140 million.
Millennium's biggest deal came last October, when it licensed the hardware and software behind its genomics technology to Monsanto for $218 million.
By 1997, the company's stock plummeted from a high of 43 1/2 to 3. Still, 3DO did not die, and that very same year Hawkins sold and licensed the hardware business to Samsung Electronics and Matsushita for $140 million.
Things are looking up over recent quarters, though, as TiVo has struck deals with pay TV operators — the same group that almost rendered its hardware irrelevant — to license its hardware and software to their subscribers.
Because the profitability of cloud services tends to be much lower than the profitability of selling or licensing hardware components and software programs, it is viewed as a potential threat to the businesses of many traditional computing companies.
