Hyperion Support - Editorial

On The State Of The Industry
by Steven Spalding

I have recently come to a conclusion, technology today has become so useful that it is pratically useless. Useless, you say? How could it be! We are at the highest stage of development, the grandest stage of human knowledge where the information of the ages is at our fingertips -- or is it? It is my opinion that tricky marketing tactics and daily doses of truly horrid television fodder have left us believing that more is always better, when that is simply not true.

Let me pose a simple question, when was the last time any of you have used Microsoft Works? Now I am absolutely sure that if the answer is "never" you would answer yes to having used Microsoft Word at some point, but either of these programs is a prime example. These office suites are filled to the brim with 'functionality', with wedgits and gadgets, files and folders of the utmost importance, or so they want us to believe. In reality, how much of this funtionality do you use on a daily basis, 10% maybe 20%? How many of us simply use these products for their primary function, as a way to produce the word documents that we find so useful, or to spell check our most recent paper or proposal? The question then is what is the purpose of the rest of these features! Is a feature truly a feature if few if any know that it exists! What is the point of a function if its purpose is every elusive? It seems to me that these functions are a monumental waste of hard disk space and processing power.
The problem is that companies are forced by market forces to add these options, without them they would fall behind, they would be left in the dust by their more fully featured competitors. This is why with each new iteration, products that were at one point small enough to fit on a single floppy disk soon became too large to even fit on a CD-R. Is this truly such a bad thing? I must whole-heartedly assert that it is and pose my solutions.

The problem arises when we realize that we are paying for these empty features. Each time software product, hardware device, consumer electronic and even household appliance makers are in need of a few extra dollars they should not be forced to release version 2.00012 of their product and more importantly we should not feel compelled to buy them! Instead we should begin to relearn what we are beginning to forget, and that is what we as consumers really need.

How many people really want a heart monitor or a back massager on their PDA? Of those same people who would rather be able to video conference with these devices without purchasing an expensive add-on? It is these type of problems that modern day marketing seems to be unable or unwilling to solve. It seems that somewhere along the line someone decided that, "if we can not discern a rational reason for creating a new product we would be best served to simply invent a new function that consumers would be more than willing to learn from scratch and tack that onto our old line!" The bad news, unfortuantely, is that people on average are not willing to learn new things. People enjoy to supplement their daily lives, not add new frustrations to them -- unless of course those frustrations have a significantly higher return than their cost.

Take the telephone for instance, people have always found a need to communicate; however, telegraphs were slow and expensive. With the invention of the telephone people were able to (after all the bugs were worked out) communicate seemlessly with their fellow man. Sure, they had to learn a new technology, but the speed and ease that the phone provided was well worth the learning curve. Now, lets take this to its next logical conclusion, the advent of the Instant Message. The reason that IMs caught on so quickly was that people enjoyed being able to communicate faster, the burden often associated with making a telephone call was reduced and hence their lives were improved by a very simple feature. Once more, they had to relearn the proverbial whell, but they found that once this curve was complete they were left with a significantly more useful technology.

Therefore, I arrive at my solution. When developing a new product I feel that inventors, investors and those who are responsible for bringing these devices to market should understand their audience. When dealing with people you must realize that oftentime simplicity will offer the greatest returns. The lower the learning curve and the more useful its function the easier it will be able to sell a cheaper more widely accepted product. This philosophy also has a side-effect which may be even more important, it breeds creativity. If companies can no longer count on being able to add features to products that already function perfectly, they will spend their R&D dollars on something more useful, like running focus groups or developing new, orginal devices.

In the end it comes down to a simple analogy which I hope any marketing specialist reading this takes to heart. If you were drowning would you prefere the Lifeguard to throw you a life preserver or to try to figure out why his brand new Lifeguarder 9000b keeps telling him that his password is not valid? The choice, as always, is yours.