A reflection on product innovation or how to buy a present for your significant other

When it comes to product development, innovation is a lot like planning a gift for your significant other.

You can always go on the safe side and conduct your "market survey" and start your quest for the perfect gift, responding to every single desire of your other half.

Yes, you will end up with a gift that is very much appreciated and that will fill a void long open. You -yes, YOU- will be in the ranks of the "reliable provider".

On the other hand, you can go the other way, the risky way. You can observe your partner for months, maybe for years, and try to translate into a model HOW do they think and feel. Once you are confident enough that you have a fairly good idea, then -and just then- set out to look for the perfect gift, without even asking a single question.

The difference here is that you will not only fulfill a desire, but you will surprise. And if you are successful, you will be LOVED. You will touch that fiber that will make her (or him) resonate.

In product development, something similar happens. Those companies that surprise us with a design that we never even thought about, earn our love, and we become advocates for them. There are many examples of this. The iPod wheel, the Segway (for the few that can afford one), the Dyson hand dryer, etc.

I am not suggesting that you blindly develop your products, after all, you need a market for them, and this means that they have to be priced correctly and that they address a real need so that there is a desire to purchase them from you. In contrast, in the gift metaphor there is no price involved from the receiving end.

What I am saying is that you cannot base your design ONLY on market research coming from surveys and direct questions.

Now, surprise me.

The Cartel of Doral

Here is my friend Artie. He's on fire, ready to take on corporate America. The reason? His TiVo is down. No digital channels, apparently he needs a card or something to make it work. Which is kinda weird as we can now receive a good number of digital channels over the air.

We heard stories like this before, the public services company that has horrendous customer service and after voicing "Scotty, Shields On!" protects itself behind the "voicejail".

We all like competition, but public services is a tricky one. There is infrastructure to lay down, and nobody is willing to do the investment if they don't have guaranteed returns. This is why government issues "rights of way" and gives the cable company an area to develop. A Cartel, a monopoly of a function in a given geographical area.

The problem with this is what we all know, and this is how the telecommunications industry used to be, until the Telecommunications Act of the eighties (oh, the eighties!), separated the ownership of the copper from the service. Oddly enough this is a case where free competition is spurred as a product of more regulation!

The question here is: Has cable the same ranks as Telecom as far as a strategic public service now that a lot of people run their Internets and phones through them?

iAccept

I am amazed at how many things can Apple get us to accept as normal, and -sometimes- even as better.

First, it was the brilliant move from Apple's side to force every customer to attach an unlimited data plan to the iPhone. This single clause in the contract had more influence on user experience than any of the technical aspects of the iPhone, so this one was -as bold as it was- an unusual one. But we accepted it.

This was accompanied by its huge size. Yes, the screen is great, and it is more or less thin, but let's be honest, it is almost the size of my 1999 Palm Pilot. Granted, it had a little apple on the back. Accepted.

Then the dubious reception and voice quality (at least on the first versions). There they went, the happy iPhone users predicating that it was just "a minor nuisance" on a super-innovative phone.

The last one, -and one that we live with every day- the on-screen keyboard.

I swear. The one app that iPhones should come with, and that no user should be able to uninstall, is a spell checker. Spelling errors and typos must have gone through the roof since the adoption of this device. Oddly enough, I just read that iPhones have surpassed Blackberries in the domestic market. This means that the trusted little keyboard that so many users swore by, has been traded for the unreliable, jittery touchscreen.

So we not only accept this, we embrace it.

I am wondering if the Apple effect could be translated to other concepts and make us accept those things that are "the right thing to do" even if they mean increased costs or moving away from our comfort zone. How about an iBus that would make us take public transport instead of our own car? or An iBulb that will finally convince us that turning off the light bulb when we have left the room IS a good idea? iMortgage, a product that gets banks to assume their share of the Real Estate bust? Anybody iBurger, made of organic stuff that costs $20?

For now, let me try to convince my teenage daughter that an Oldsmobile is a great car. I hope this little Apple sticker works...

The "unconvergence" age

Everything is cyclic. In business and technology we see it all the time. We push, push, push and there is a point where the market stops us as saying "that's just way too much".

The convergent device has been great. Being able to integrate phone with PDA and then being able to GPS locate and email almost everything on the device is just fantastic.

However, I find myself more and more in a situation where I would rather prefer a second device, an example is when I am driving following a map and suddenly somebody calls.

The question here is how do we approach this? I can think of three basic solutions:

1.- Better and smarter peripherals. If the audio interface and a second display on goggles could be an option, maybe -and just maybe- we won't need a second device.

2.- The dedicated device collection. We tried this, and while we somewhat like it, it is not the Holy Grail. Carrying a collection of dedicated devices is not a good answer.

3.- The second, multipurpose, connected device. One is not enough? Try two! Not a brilliant idea but if we can limit the number of devices that we carry to two, and both can do everything we can dream of, we also get redundancy. To some extent this is happening with the arrival of the iPad. In fact many appleheads just think in "number of Apples I own". Good for Jobs, that is Steve Jobs.

4.- The interactive environment. Let's expand on concept 1. Turn your car into a peripheral. When you sit in your car, your device works like a security token and information is shared. Suddenly you have access to the map on your personal device and display it on the dashboard, or your phone can use the car stereo, and the car marks your calendar for the oil change. To some extent we are there. Now expand that thought to Home and the big screen TV, or the office's keyboard, mouse and monitor and desk phone.

Whichever way we go, the key here is to establish the real, secure Personal Area Network. Is Bluetooth ready for this?

Bump is Magic

If something is true about my Myers-Briggs profile (ENTJ if you ask...) is that I get easily fascinated and entertained by ideas and concepts. This is one of those cases.

For those of you who don't know, "Bump" is an app that runs both on iPhone and Android and allows you to share your contact info by "bumping" your phones against each other.

By an elaborate and innovative flow of information the user is fooled into believing that the act of touching the two phones is doing the trick, while the devices in fact don't have anything that allows for this!

What is really happening is that the devices connect to a central server, notifying that they want to exchange a set of data, and when the accelerometer detects that the phone is "bumped", the server tries to match the GPS coordinates with another phone being bumped at the very same precise moment. Clever huh?

It is like a coordinate-authenticated PAN (Personal Area Network).

The part that I really get hung up on is that this is like faking a punch and having the other being put out by lightning!

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The retro-ignorant

We had more technology evolution in the last century than in all of human history before that. Those that are near their 40s today are witneses of the proverbial shift, not as experienced by our generation but more by observing that of our parents and our children.

My father in law was a very intelligent and agile man, who travelled half of the world routinely. He was both exposed to the advances of the Old World, as well as the enormous cultural differences present in South America. He was also a fan of shooting home movies on "Super-8" as many in his generation.

In the 80s, when the then new generation of Camcorders was out he decided to buy one. My wife and her siblings would make fun of him as he kept adjusting the camcorder's position -now plugged into the TV- to "project" the image to the screen. Obviously, he was having a hard time assimilating the new technology and opted on relying on his past experience.

Another example was my own father, having worked as a mainframe programmer for almost 25 years, had a hard time digesting the relative "ease of use" of Windows 95.

This used to be the norm, older people would "get stuck" on the older technology and younger, smarter generations would take their place and would master BOTH the newer technology and the old one. In this same year, anybody my age would be equally proficient handling the camcorder/VCR/TV or the Super 8 projector.

What is interesting today, is that technology is evolving at such a pace that learning the newer technologies does not allow for any room to understand the old ones, and this comes to equally embarassing ignorance. Retro Ignorance. Just a few examples: A 15 year old (unless is a DJ) would not know how to play a Vinyl or a Cassette tape, the fact that you cannot skip immediately to another song would puzzle them. I have seen them trying multi-touch gestures on non-touch screens. They don't understand how a car works, connect to the Internet through a modem, operate a typewriter, drive a stick-shift, the list keeps going on and on.

"Three factor" authentication

It is truly amazing how human nature prevails. As much as we try to change, rule and regulate human behavior, there are examples in every field.

It is a known fact that when tax rates increase about a certain threshold, revenues begin to drop as evasion becomes more common place. The fiercest regimes are usually the ones that fall quicker.

But this blog is not supposed to be about sociology or politics, but about technology and management and in reality the issue that prompts me to write this time is the obsession of some IT Security departments to implement every single possible "best practice" as security measures. Two-factor authentication is one and the most common version is the security token, so this guarantees the unbreakable duet: something you know (the password) and something you have in your possession (the token). So when you put these together you have successfully authenticated yourself. This is not a new concept and it has been used ancestrally, just remember the stories that verse about tattoos or moles, passwords and objects that would identify a king, a priest, or a knight.

Changing passwords and setting up rules to construct valid and secure passwords is also a good idea, the problem arises when these rules restrict dramatically the number of words the user can choose and effectively remember. When combined with a stringent requirement for changing them too frequently together with a strict no re-use policy, these policies can be counter productive as they make it almost impossible for the user to commit multiple and random letter/number combinations to memory.

I see this trend quite often, where most users have to identify themselves with a "THREE-FACTOR" authenticate method: The Token, the Password and the piece of paper where they wrote down the password and how to login.