A while ago I blogged about so-called early adopters, how mind-meltingly dim they are and how grateful I am for their dedication to lowering the price and helping fix faults in new technologies.
A colleague and I were discussing this the other day and came up with an expression to describe the area of technological developments in which they reside. We already have “The Cutting Edge” and “The Bleeding Edge”, but this is where the developers and engineers live; people who are actually working on the technology. Just behind them is the zone where new technologies are made available to the public on day zero, for vast amounts of money, together with badly thought out designs, bugs and flimsy cases that take several revisions to fix: this is The Wanker’s Edge.
The Wankers Edge is where you’ll find products like:
- The first releases of Windows Vista/XP/98/95/3/2.x
- Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drives
- The first version of the iPhone/iPod
- All HTC mobile phones (yes I do own one)
- DAB radio
- MacOS 10.0/10.1
It’s also the area where all of the ‘extreme’ twats hang out with their gigawatt solid-gold car stereos, sub-woofers that need munitions-licences before they can be operated in public, and overclocked PCs that need industrial refrigeration units.
