What it is

   How it works

   Why it's better

   How it's used

   Who would use it
      Calling Michael Dell
      Calling Steve Jobs
   Who will win
   Why it's timely
   Green credentials
   How much would it cost
   Frequently Asked Questions
   Give me the details
   And there's more
   Patents pending
   To learn more

Amazon
Amazon has revolutionized the publishing industry.  It excels at customer facing relationship building, web development, content management, supply logistics, supplier partnering, and management.  Kindle exemplifies Amazon’s willingness to design and manufacture category-defining hardware.

How might Amazon benefit from sideloading?  There are multiple ways.  Amazon sells a variety of consumer electronics– computers, video game consoles, flat panel televisions, DVRs, music players, cell phones, and ebooks.  Each category thrives on additional digital content.  Amazon can sell pure content, sell other companies’ machines with content, and design and sell their own machines with content.  This can be in done in a variety of ways ranging from completely independently, through different degrees of partnering, to  imposing specific configurations that manufacturers must supply to be carried.

At the simplest level, Amazon can sell sideloaded libraries of electronic media for those devices.  Standard compilations are fixed. With a sideloaded dynamic bundle, every title can be separately included or excluded and offered on a small USB drive or SD card.

Library drives music books art
These systems when “off” can act as high definition picture frames.  Such units could be sold preloaded with photo collections from the great museums of the world eg the Louvre, Met, MoMA, Uffizi, British Museum, Hermitage, National Gallery, and Prado. Buyers could pick by museum, artist, genre, date range, or medium.
USB SD Cards           

Makers of USB external drives, like Seagate, Western Digital, or Toshiba, can sell entire music catalogues, (eg Deutsche Gramophone or Blue Note), pre-loaded on their drives ready-to-play on any personal computer at 12-15 compact discs per GB.  Customers could keep everything or select pieces by composer, soloist, orchestra, symphony etc.  Likewise, Zunes, Zens, Sansas, or iPods music players could come preloaded with a vast selection of music. 

A new DVR or USB drive can come pre-loaded with a selection of archives of popular TV series, eg Sopranos (6 seasons), Sex & the City (6), Lost (4), The Wire (5), The Simpsons (19), Desperate Housewives (4), Alias (5), or South Park (12).  A 1 GB drive holds as many as 4 half hour broadcast episodes. The long-running Simpsons series has 400 episodes.  A buyer could select an entire series, a season, or particular episodes.

Makers of large flat panel TVs are equipping them with hard drives eg the 42” Lucky Goldstar  LG 42LB1DR HDTV/DVR combo. These systems when “off” can act as high
definition picture frames.  Such units could be sold preloaded with photo collections from the great museums of the world eg the Louvre, Met, MoMA, Uffizi, British Museum, Hermitage, National Gallery, and Prado. Buyers could pick by museum, artist, genre, date range, or medium.     

Apple

Apple customers enjoy a carefully orchestrated experience integrating design, marketing, sales, packaging, and support.  As Apple moves from strength to strength, its computer, music player, and handset offerings would all benefit from preloading digital content.  Sideloading evolves and enhances the seamless user experience and reinforces the Apple brand image for exclusivity, uniqueness, and ease of use. 

Disciplined Experience Channel control, content licensing,

Apple has done a spectacular job of taking a commodity product, add value and charge premium dollar - all while keeping their customer happier then any other computer/cell phone vendor.

Apple leads in customer satisfaction.  It would be a terrible mistake for them to lower their prices to play in the Dell sandbox. Just look at the numbers - Dell's margin is around 5%; Apple's around 30%. Dell is valued at about 1/3d of its revenue; Apple is valued at 3 times its revenue.

It might sub-license in areas like game consoles where it does not participate.
Apple would strengthen its consumer franchise (and its superior returns on net tangible assets)   content management

As examples of segmentation, Apple might offer, via web or retail customer-focused computers - an iKids SKU with every game and educational program published for the Mac or iEye SKU containing any Mac program or font used by an architect, graphic designer, model maker, or animator. 

Nokia makes handsets with miniature internal hard drives or flash drives.  When those units are purchased, they can come preloaded with a variety of ring tones, games, and music. On handset activation, the unpurchased assets are removed, leaving the specific material that the customer has purchased.

AOL
Toaster

Best Buy
Inventory costs, Differentiation, Revenue
A Best Buy could sell upgrade drives for existing Windows XP or Vista PCs.  A drive would have a Microsoft Windows 7 and a selection of compliant applications.  Geek Squad staff could swap in the new drive, migrate user data, and remove the applications unwanted by each particular customer.

Dell
Build-To-Order (BTO) software and BTO hardware make a perfect pair.  Sideloading is a natural extension to Dell’s traditional, zero-inventory, BTO model.  Dell gets revenue from hardware, accessories, service contracts, and promoting trialware. Sideloading is more efficient and time-constant than Dell’s current method of additive overlay.  It would allow a wider variety of software and other assets, like music and video, to be sold than is currently feasible and provide a robust new profitable revenue stream with little investment and low cost of marketing.

Sideloading would have the greatest positive impact for Dell’s CFO to who is expected to routinely make his numbers - year on year, quarter on quarter, and regionally on units, sales, profit, margins, ASP, and new customers.  Hardware and software are economic complements with different prices and profit margins. To treat them separately sacrifices economic surplus.

 for  Also, sideloading might allow Dell greater flexibility to optimize for revenue, units, or profit growth.

Foxconn
Decentralized but in conjunction with Apple a winning platform.
Hon Hai is the largest contract manufacturer, besides making personal computers for a wide variety of OEMs, it produces Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Wii game consoles and Apple iPhone, Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson handsets.  It is thus well positioned to use sideloading for a number of OEMs in a variety of product sectors.  It is less of a player in making laptop computers.  Hon Hai could use this IP to take business generally away from its competitors and improve market share or provide exclusive licenses to one OEM per sector or region to improve its margins.

Hewlett Packard

Microsoft
Resources and relationships – content management service, games, competition
Microsoft XBox could come loaded with blockbuster games like Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty 5, This is Vegas, Hail to the Chimp, Halo 3, Rock Bank, Ikaruga, Mass Effect, UEFA EURO 2008, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, and Condemned 2: Bloodshot.  As the combined cost of the software far exceeds the cost of the hardware, this approach can substantially boost revenues and margins.  At less than 35 cents per gigabyte, it would be economical for Microsoft to increase the size of the available drives.

Quanta
Notebooks

Samsung

Drives, phones, pc entrance into us. 
Samsung has also included Digital Living Network Alliance DLNA networking capabilities for the streaming of videos, photos and music from DLNA certified devices, while the inclusion of two USB ports allows the direct connection of portable hard drives, digital cameras, MP3 players and USB thumbdrives to access stored content. Samsung has also included built-in content such as recipes, games, workout guides, and a slideshow of high-definition art and photos with music.

These systems when “off” can act as high definition picture frames.  Such units could be sold preloaded with photo collections from the great museums of the world eg the Louvre, Met, MoMA, Uffizi, British Museum, Hermitage, National Gallery, and Prado. Buyers could pick by museum, artist, genre, date range, or medium.           

Sony
Content PCs Phones Games

Toshiba
Drives, PC leadership

Wal*Mart
Private label or demand from manufactures or

Personal Computers can be bought with a choice of thousands of software programs, along with music, games, and video.  PCs for a large corporation like GE can come with shrinkwrap software and proprietary enterprise applications appropriate for different functions, geographies, and responsibility levels.