Sony Aibo
I know I'm somewhat wrong, but I see no market for this whatsoever, besides as a learning toy for student AI laboratories, where the original AIBO is still popular. Can someone give me an example of a type of person of any wealth level or personality that would willingly go out of their way to purchase this? It doesn't clean the floor, so there's no practical function. It's not an MP3 player that follows you around or a Siri-like assistant, so it can't optimize your existing means of entertainment. The website advertises "love", but I see 0% actual connection with it, so anyone that claims this reason is doing it either ironically or perhaps due to certain object attraction mental conditions. If anyone wants to cure lonliness, this would seem to have zero effect. As a toy for children or hobbyist adults, it seems like a fun thing to play with and show your friends for a few days, but no better than a yoyo which is few orders of magnitude cheaper. For "tinkerers", it would be fun to program applications into it that use the sensors and motors, but if that was their primary market, it would advertised as an open development platform and they would leave out the pre-programmed AI. So what am I missing here?<p>If I was an investor, I would value this at no more than $0 because sales can't possibly surpass R&D. What reasons are there to believe otherwise?<p>EDIT: So it seems in this discussion I've learned that many believe that the love for dogs <i>can</i> actually be replaced by love for inanimate objects, which is a bizarre concept to me, but if the number of people who are able to do that is truly as significant as people are claiming, then I suppose I could see why this product could become successful.