What we really need: without the effects of the reality-distortion field

As the idiotic rumor mill about a product that does not exist continues and probably increases until the middle of this week, I thought that it would be productive to talk about what we need, as of today, from a technological point of view.

We already know that the apple tablet will save the media world (yeah, right), that Google (with Android in the USA) and Nokia (with Ovi Maps in the rest of the world) will completely reshape the GPS-navigation market. But those are things that we, honestly, don't need.

Think about it. What are the most common problems we face in the technological/connected electronic device world today?

The first hurdle: Price

One of the problems we face is price. Thanks to the OLPC now we have netbooks. Maybe our collective memories are too short to remember, but it was the OLPC foundation with AMD that revolutionized the connected laptop business. Were it not for that amazing device we would still be lugging around huge laptops with far more processing power than we need. So, thanks OLPC and AMD for making our technological world better. If you add to that the fact that the OLPC project brings technology to a large set of the world's population that did not previously have access to it it becomes a no-brainer that the OLPC project is changing the world far more than is the interest of the companies we so often tout as "innovative" and "game changing".

The second hurdle: connectivity

Most of the devices we have today suffer from a frustrating lack of connectivity. If you live outside the relatively well covered north and central Europe or major North America cities, you know how bad things can get.

The promise of 3G is still far from being common place. GPRS (or 2G) connectivity is more wide-spread but has a bandwidth that would make the modems of the 90's look speedy in comparison. However, the largest problem of all is to have connectivity at all. Most of the world is dark, no connectivity fast or slow. ALso, most of the devices out there lack basic connectivity outside our homes. Laptops, for example, become expensive bricks as soon as you step outside your favorite coffee shop.

Any device or ecosystem that revolutionizes our world needs to solve this problem.

The third hurdle: The price of connectivity

In this realm there is already some movement. The Kindle from Amazon is arguably the most widely know example of innovation in this area with the price of connectivity being covered by the purchase price, but there are probably already more Nokia phones implementing this model today then there are Kindle devices (there's no way to know, Amazon does not publish the numbers). Nokia's Comes With Music (CWM) phones include internet connectivity in their purchase price or monthly fee.
This innovation in the model for buying connectivity has the potential to exponentially grow the number of always-connected mobile devices to the point where netbooks and laptops become a connectivity niche. Smart cellular operators will want to jump on this bandwagon and create an early lead in developing and profiting from this business model.
However the price of connectivity-problem is far from being solved for the average consumer. The examples above are but a drop of rain in the desert. A lot more is needed if our lives are to be significantly improved.

Open standards and the cost of doing business

I could write a lot about this, but this article alone does a great job of describing why closed standards have the potential to "kill" innovation and destroy the web as we know it today.
The gist of the argument is: closed standards will be used to extort money from content creators and providers. In turn this means that new content creation and distribution is severely hampered to the point that it loses value and stops being useful let alone revolutionary.

Usability: the key to mass market products

Usable products are the basis for any mass market product. This should come as no surprise. The fact that most people know how to operate a mobile phone but need to call support when they have PC-problems will make sure simpler products win over the long term. After all, device manufacturers and distributors want to spend money in sales and R&D, not support. Any product or service that aims to change our lives will have to be as simple to use (if not simpler) than a mobile phone.

However, usability as such will become an enabler, a stepping stone to the success of products. It is very likely that as soon as most companies catch up on this front (like HTC, Samsung and LG are already doing and Intel is exploring with Moblin) usability alone will stop being a competitive advantage (and apple knows that).

Mobile connectivity for the masses, the next frontier

One hidden fact in all discussions of "tech revolutions" is that the major revolution that we have seen and are still witnessing is the extent to which mobile access will become the norm. According to some sources Mobile Internet access is already larger than desktop/laptop internet access. This trend is likely to continue as internet access becomes more common in mobile devices; and it should be no surprise because there are already more than 4 billion mobile phone users. Many more than PC users (around 1 billion).

Once the internet starts to be accessible from these mobile phones (and it is already in many of the them today), it is easy to see that the next frontier for "revolutionary tech devices" is the mobile phone market. This is the *real* mass market.

Open Internet is the future, closed formats destroy value

Another revolution factor for the connected world is the format of information. Here the open source world has led the way and is likely to continue to do so. Internet Explorer showed us how dangerous the closed formats can be, to the point that people lose access to valuable data (online banks that support only ie, anyone?) I expect that the open source movement will continue to lead here. One only needs to look at the mobile OS landscape to see how the Open Source model has the potential to change the ecosystem. Today, all major mobile OS are open source to some extent. This is no accident, DRM in the 90's proved that closed formats delay adoption of technology and build unacceptable barriers to those people that we should support: the consumers.

The inconvenient truth for information oligopolies is this: you will not be able to control the format of information. You don't need to take my word for it, just look around. Twitter is revolutionizing the access to information from the time perspective. Google is doing it from the extensiveness perspective (with their Google news and Search products), but many others are also doing the same: Blogs, aggregators, curators (like aggregators, but with brains). The list goes on.

The New York Times or Frankfurter Allgemeine still have a place in the world after the connectivity revolution, but they don't own the format of information anymore. Amazon is already considering dropping DRM on the Kindle and others will follow. Information wants to be free and any business model that closes/denies access to information is bound to disappear sooner or later. Just see what happened to music and news.

The catch here is: access to information is not the value. It is what you do with that information that will make or break your business. Here, Google has a large lead, but others are not sleeping...

Conclusion

Here are but a few aspects that a new "device or ecosystem" needs to solve to claim to be revolutionary. There is far too much speculation about how this or that device is or will be revolutionary. The point is, that you can win at any of these items but completely fail at creating lasting value.

Companies that are in this for the long term will need to consistently tackle most (if not all) of these issues and constantly improve.

Having written this, I hope as many companies as possible try to be revolutionary. It is for our benefit.

Post-scriptum

While researching and writing this post I came up with other key aspects that did not make the final cut. I'd like to highlight only one for which I could not add much value both because of time and because I don't know enough about it: The Environment.

Any mass market product that does not take Ecological Sustainability as a key aspect of it's ecosystem will be doomed sooner or later. Consumers are smart, it does not take too long before they acknowledge what is really relevant for them as a group and destroying natural resources will be a major issue for any consumer product. In some countries it is already.

Photo Credits: Roebot @ Flickr; laihiu @ Flickr; pfala @ Flickr

Why Apple deserves to sell many iPods/iTouch (or Why MUST features will kill your project...)

So lately I've been trying to convince some friends that they don't want to have "MUST" features in their project, rather they should opt for a force-ranked prioritization of all features that they want to deliver.

First off, I must explain this idea. You do still have a minimum marketable content for your product. If you are delivering a text editor that might include being able to write text, saving in UTF-8 or localization into Finnish (if you happen to want to sell your product there). There's nothing wrong with wanting a minimal set of functionality before you release your baby to the cruel world out there.

Having said that, there's a huge different between defining a minimal releasable content and having MUST features.

For starters the "MUST" state of mind normally leads to having MUST features that are not at the top of the list of things to do. You will say to yourself that you have to do this architectural change here, or improve the UI for another feature over there. But you will release that super-duper MUST feature even if it is like 40th on the list of 80 things, of which you can complete about 20 before the competition outruns you... Stop kidding yourself!

If it is a MUST, then it is the first on the list, no exceptions. At any point in one project there's only one and only one MUST feature -- the one you are working on! And even that can be scoped-down to suit your market-driven deadline. This is so that if your market changes, you can respond quickly and release a new product ASAP.

You will have certain features (maybe 1 or 2) that you will not be able to release without, others can be greatly de-scoped to make you release faster.

A good example was Windows XP. The first layer of the UI was great (compared to Win98/2K), but when you started digging around you saw that the second and subsequent layers were just the same as in Win2K. XP was supposed to come out faster, so they did not polish every single nob, they went for what made sense: faster OS and better looking first impressions.

Another example was Nokia's Ovi. They started with an empty website! Later they added Share.ovi.com and eventually went on to build the entire portofolio -- they understood time was not on their side!

Some people would argue that, you still need MUST features even if they make you delay a product release, that those MUST features are worth it because (aledgedly) they are so important that we could not sell the product without those. To those people I say: really? Did you know that 64% of all features in software products are "rarely or never used"? When was the last time that you used voice recognition on your windows box? Or when was the last time you tweaked all the settings available in Windows?

The fact is that we need to be "Editors" of our software products. There are very few things that make people buy our software/hardware products (Rio vs iPod anyone?), and those are the only things that make sense to build in the first place.

Now, you will hear from many companies the idea that "no, we need to build feature X before we release!". That's just dumb! While you spend precious time building those features your competitors will be laughing all the way to the bank!

For those of you that may not believe me here's an example: Windows Mobile has had most of the features that the iPod/iPhone has today and much more that iPod and iPhone don't have. However the iPod/iPhone are selling at a much faster pace that Windows Mobile, why is that?

After all Apple did come from behind and for the iPod Touch started from scratch (compared to WinMobile which is quite developed and stable platform and was already when Apple started to work on the iPhone/iPod Touch), and Apple had to develop their own Hardware! How come they provide a better product that WinMobile?

The reason is simple: Apple did not cram the iPod Touch with features, they went for the 20% that satisfy 80% of the customers and used their delivery system to deliver new features later. They did not wait on their asses until they had a similar feature-set to the WinMobile. Heck they even missed the mobile e-mail boom with the MobileMe debacle!

The reason for Apple's success was simple: release the product at the right time and put money where in pays: in top-quality marketing!

There were a couple of MUST features in the iPod/iPhone that they had to get right before their release, but the most important feature was: release date! If you are as good as Apple at marketing your products, you can even charge your early adopters extra to get basic applications that all other mobile devices already have (iPod Touch update for money to firmware 2.0).

There are many features that you would consider MUST that were never implemented in some products, but those products were successful anyway! (3G on the iPhone 1?) The people designing those products understood that what made their products successfull was not that extra set of features. It was a completely different set of constraints. In the consumer market, things like visibility (placement, marketing, channel) or price have a far larger impact on the success of the product than many (i'd say maybe even 90%) of the features that get added to those products.

When you start a project, decide which are the economic drivers for your product: do you want to hit a market on a set date? Do you want a pre-defined set of features? Do you want to use a certain channel? Ask yourself what is important before deciding to use "MUST" features. Don't shoot yourself in the foot just because you didn't spend 5 minutes thinking about what makes your product successful.