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<H2><A NAME="s3">3. Advocacy</A> </H2>
<P>Some people may want to know why you want to build a wearable or you may have
to sell your idea to the people who are responsible for the purchase.
Here are some ideas you may use.
<P>
<H2><A NAME="ss3.1">3.1 Why ?</A>
</H2>
<P>Because, you want to experiment by yourself, because you think that
Human Computer Interaction is not a matter of designing the n-th
windowmanager, because you feel that enhanced reality is the cutting
edge of your evolution.
<P>
<P>
<H2><A NAME="ss3.2">3.2 The Wearable concept is not a revolution, it is just an evolution.</A>
</H2>
<P>Some people are afraid of revolutionary or so called products, thus
the good news is that the wearable may look like a revolutionary
concept but it is actually just an evolution of the computing hardware.
Let me explain that&nbsp;: At first there was the Mainframe, then came the
desktop computer enabling people to work in their office, latter the
PC enabled these people to work at home too, as time passed the
portable PC enabled people to work in a Hotel room, or everywhere they
could find a power plug ( yes an Osborne or an IBM's convertible were
definitively not laptop computers ), at the same time some pocket
computers appeared on the market : Sharp PC1500, Canon X07, Casio
PB100 then the first one weighted less and less, the second one
disappeared but the LCD screen was, with other things their legacy
allowing the laptop to emerge, as the laptop went mainstream,
its size went smaller allowing people to work in the train, at the
library ..., then palmtop PC's such as the HP95LX and PDA's appeared,
( at this time the most successful is
the PalmPilot family and its clones ) allowing people to work on the
move, so the wearable is just the next step in this move towards
miniaturization.
( If you want to learn more about Laptops and Linux you should read
the Laptop-HOWTO, the latest version can be found at Werner's Heuser
<A HREF="http://www.snafu.de/~wehe/index_li.html"> Homepage </A> )
<H2><A NAME="ss3.3">3.3 The Wearable may give its user an edge.</A>
</H2>
<P>
In today's competitive world it is very important to get an edge over
the other company, thus for example in a plane repair company the
engineers who are using wearables do not waste time in asking for
blueprints but instead have the blueprint and the technical data at
will while performing their job, thus they will be able to repair the
planes faster. You may choose an example in your job.
<P>
<H2><A NAME="ss3.4">3.4 The Wearable concept: a stealth menace.</A>
</H2>
<P>When they made their first appearance on the market, some products or technologies
were, to say the least, less than perfect. This is a stealth menace,
if you read Clayton Christensen's book "The innovator's dilemma: when
new technologies cause great firms to fail" or Andy's Grove "Only the
paranoid survives" you will see that some corporations that relies on
a product and that have a king of the hill may fall down because they
overlooked a new product/technology that was clumsy at its beginning
and was at first in a market niche, then the contender took over the market.
<P>
<H2><A NAME="ss3.5">3.5 Wearable computing: an emerging industry.</A>
</H2>
<P>The people who decide to fund your project are not always very found about technical
details, thus you will have to use other arguments, otherwise your pet
project will be sent to /dev/null.
If one reads again chapter 2 of AP Sloan's book: "My years with
General Motors" it is obvious that the Wearable industry is
going into the same changes as did the automobile industry in the US
at the turn of the century&nbsp;: it turned from a Hobby with some small
manufacturers to a mass market Industry. It took nearly 30 years to
the automobile industry to change, but the wearable industry should
have done this changes in less than 5 years, so if they don't invest
on this product others will do.
<P>
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