Automotive GPS startup Dash Express announced today that it's getting out of the hardware business, cutting its workforce, and repositioning itself as a software-only company. This kind of drastic move where a VC-backed company with an exciting product and a lot of enthusiasm behind it is suddenly forced to change course, will soon become par for the course here in Silicon Valley, as the region's deep pockets continue to close up.
TechCrunch has a few more details on the changes than Dash's press release gives, reporting that the Sequoia- and Kleiner Perkins-backed company has cut a whopping 65 percent of its workforce. Most of those cuts are probably the folks responsible for the hardware side of the Internet-connected GPS product, which will cease production as the company concentrates solely on getting its Dash software onto as many GPS-enable devices as possible.
I was an early adopter of the Dash Express, and while I never reviewed it for Ars, I will admit to being underwhelmed by it. I'm a directionally-challenged GPS addict and a long-time Garmin user, so I was caught up in the initial wave of excitement over the Dash announcement. I loved the concept of a GPS unit that was always attached to the Internet via a 3G network, and I promptly bought one when the devices became available on Amazon earlier this year. Sadly, the execution was lacking, and it was the hardware that needed to improve the most.
Screen redraws are painfully slow, and route calculation takes ages, which leads me to believe that the hardware is underpowered. The device is also poorly designed from a user interface perspective; it's heavy and bulky, and its size obscures too much in the driver's field of vision when it's mounted on a dash (as is the law in California). It also has a large "Menu" button that spans the top of the device and is touch sensitive; this means that if you grab the device to adjust it or remove it from the mount, then the odds are very good that you'll hit the "Menu" button whether you want to or not. These and other aspects of the hardware gave me the impression that the hardware was designed by the kinds of Linux geeks who think that Enlightenment is a k-rad window manager.
The Dash software wasn't perfect, either—I definitely felt that it played the Yugo to Garmin's Ferrari. And in addition to some really strange routing problems, I was never even remotely impressed with the vaunted real-time traffic data when compared to the MSN Direct service that Garmin uses.
In spite of all of its implementation flaws, though, the concepts that the Dash Express embody are still very exciting, and the parts of the package that worked (i.e. Send2Car, live Yahoo! searching, installable applets, over-the-air updates, and others) really worked well. Dash was a product that was clearly going somewhere; it had a ton of promise, and given more time, funding, and creative energy it could well have developed into a widely popular, and even revolutionary, in-car computing product.
But alas, Dash needs more breathing room than the current economic environment can give it, and the changes that have been forced on it are a loss, not only for the company's employees and investors, but for consumers as well. The company may well survive and even thrive as a software-only entity, and indeed, I look forward to seeing the software proliferate. But those who believe that all stand-alone GPS units are destined to be replaced by smartphones are missing the real promise of a dedicated, low-cost, networked, in-car computing platform whose hardware characteristics (screen readability, device durability, integration with other car electronics and systems, mounting options) and software (low-touch, low-attention user interface) are tailored to the automobile environment; in short, such people have never used a Dash Express.
Sadly, Dash is probably the first in a long line of examples of innovation that was cut short by the global economic crisis. In that respect, the Dash announcement serves as a reminder that the problems here in Silicon Valley are more than just an opportunity to make fun of "pre-revenue" Web 2.0 startups and the hype-addicted VCs that backed them. The story that's unfolding here is also about a loss of potential innovation and growth, because the good ideas are suffering along with the bad.
