If you had to list the most popular gadgets of the last 50 years, what would you pick?
The wireless radio, laptop computer or PC perhaps? Would the iPad, pager, heating thermostat or solar panels be on your list?
Surprisingly, none of these useful inventions are among the gadgets adopted most quickly over the past 50 years.
In a paper for the Journal of Management and Marketing Research, Tarique M. Hossain has drilled down through consumer data to find that the boom box is in fact the gadget most quickly embraced since the late sixties.
Hossain's paper, 'Diffusion and experience curve pricing of new products in the consumer electronics industry' shows how as gadget manufacturing knowledge spread, costs were lowered and some gadgets widely embraced.
Most of the gadgets featured revolve around the sharing of information, rather than the making of it. The Apple mac and the PC are missing, but the fax, projector TV, the iPod, CD Walkman, DVD and VCR players are on there.
Hossain set out to provide insight for industry on pricing new products, but the results also provide a fascinating insight into the gadgets that grabbed our imagination, and those that didn't.
Which gadgets can you believe are not on the list?
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