Future product

Future product is a campaignable issue

There are three kinds of future products:

1. Ones that are known to be in development in some company
2. New product descriptions suggested/requested by any party
3. Existing products, especially craft or agricultural products, that are almost extinct, e.g. the kind that Slow Food tries to bring back into the market.

Voting on future products is a very important feature in many ways. It has a good potential to make the economy perform more smoothly and efficiently and with less waste due to less obsolete products entering the marketplace.

However, voting does not guarantee that the voter will buy. Only actual money laid out in advance will do that. Even investing in a company is not an agreement to buy the product, although it is a bet that someone will in fact buy it. Allowing people to provisionally buy a product before it exists is a great way to ensure it actually is created, but does not always work. Examples where it worked: Slow Food's reintroduction of native American wild turkey species, and pre-orders for the Quake game by Id Software which were enough to pay for the game development and a healthy profit margin. Examples where it didn't work: GM's advance commitment to buy one billion dollars worth of PCS base station handoff hardware from any vendor that produced it, since it would literally end any GM reliance on long distance carriers or probably ANY telephone carriers, since with this technology GM could be its own phone company. The carriers, terrified of losing large corporate customers, suppressed the technology by boycotting any vendor that tried to meet the standard. This has worked now for about eight years.