Originally Posted by
tmiw
...will be the only card on my Coin. If they ever ship that thing.
Hate to sound pessimistic, but Coin very well might turn out like the
Dynamics card.
1. Innovative idea
2. Wins awards
3. Get appraisals from venture capitalists
4. May even have a bank pick up the idea (as Citi did with Dynamics)
Except...
5. It never really sees the daylight and ends up being DoA
The problem with both Dynamics and Coin is that it was really an idea product centric to the American credit card payments environment geared solely for American cardholders, when credit cards themselves have become a global payments standard in an increasingly globalized world.
It was stuck in the idea where Americans use their credit cards at their local 7-Eleven or at Macy's, when credit cards have expanded beyond that to Americans purchasing Shinkansen tickets, Japanese purchasing JetBlue tickets, British shopping in Berlin, to Germans driving on the French toll roads.
It's like coming up with a brand new idea for a cell phone that only Americans would use and works in the US when the proper thing to do is like Apple and Google: introduce a product line of smartphones that works everywhere in the world whether one is in Los Angeles, London, or Tokyo, whether one is an American, British, or Japanese via the global GSM/3G/4G/HSDPA standard.
We live in an increasingly globalized world; there are somethings like credit cards and cell phones which need to see a broader market view of the world for it to be successful. The failure of Coin and Dynamics is that they failed to realize that only the US was the sole country left in the world still using mag-stripes in a globalized world, they never sought out beyond what was going on outside the US, and they didn't do the research that everywhere else they were using EMV.
And when countered by this fact, they go on the defense that they will be working on a solution for that later. But people don't want solutions later. What good is getting Coin if you know it's going to fail when traveling abroad with no clear idea or timeframe when they figure out how to do the same thing with EMV? People want a product that works right now, right out of the box, that works everywhere. Just like an iPhone. Just like a Google Android phone.