As RIM launches its app store to lukewarm reviews and Palm seeds its dev kit to a ho-hum response, I'm left wondering: why don't big companies get that the best way to disrupt a market leader is with simplicity and polish and not feature copy-and-paste and bad integration?

Recently I ran across a term in the blogosphere which I like very much: "Minimum Viable Product." The concept is particularly useful to web offerings where the MVP can be as limited as a Google AdWords campaign testing the appeal, but I think the approach is worth porting to hardware products, especially these days when most CE companies are leveraging the Lego-like bricks that the big ODMs provide to snap together bad copies of market successes.

My two favorite examples of hardware MVPs are the Flip video camcorder and the Peek messaging device. Both pass the test that the marketing department of any big company would have flunked them during the planning phase for "not being differentiated enough," and yet Flip (now Cisco) is well on the way to being a video camera powerhouse and Peek seems to have a good head of steam.

Hardware is often complicated by the challenges of the channel: because it is made of atoms that require transport and selling, product designers often have to be sensitive to a series of retailer/carrier requests that can border on the insane wishes of an inbred king. I don't quite know how to solve this one, but continuing to do so in an era where companies are increasingly learning to go direct (and consumers as well) seems to be a recipe for disaster.

In the meanwhile, I'd like to spend some time thinking about what an MVP would be for an "information display device" (think small tablet or photo frame) that people could use to truly extend the Internet into their kitchens. But that is for a later post.