commentary
Reverse income statement
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | commentary | No Comments
Here’s an interesting idea for doing a reality check on the business plan component of a product vision. It’s called a reverse income statement.
Typically, what happens when somebody designs a conventional plan is they start off with the revenues they hope to get. They estimate what the costs are. They subtract the costs from the revenues and that tells them what the profits are going to be. A reverse income statement starts with the profits I must earn to make it worthwhile. I can then calculate what the maximum cost can be in order for me to make those profits, and then what the revenue should be in order for me to make the profits.
So, you start with the income statement at the bottom and you work up instead of starting at the top and working down. That’s what we mean by the reverse financials. Very rapidly, you may find that in order for you to be able to make the numbers that you plan to make in terms of profits, all you need is 5000% market share — at which stage you say, “Oops, let’s go and do something else.” You really don’t know, but it gives you a sense of what the scope is.
[By Rita Gunther McGrath, courtesy knowledge@wharton]
Paleofuturism
Monday, May 4th, 2009 | commentary | 1 Comment
It’s interesting to look back at old visions for the future and compare them against how things really turned out.
Like these 1993 “You Will” commercials from AT&T that includes a glance at something resembling an EO.
I was at GO Corp at the time and it was exciting to see something like what we were doing be exposed to the mainstream.
The field is called w PS: They were wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
Wikipedia calls it retro-futurism. Matt Novak has a whole blog devoted to the cause he calls Paleo-Future. This site is a great resource for those of us interested in the nature of envisioning future products. What did our predecessors get right and wrong? What are the patterns of failure that we can apply to our predictions today?
PS: AT&T was wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
Apple bans keyboards from iPhones
Friday, April 24th, 2009 | commentary, news | No Comments
Apple has a long standing button-phobia. But their recent declarations that iPhone are a no-keyboard zone are disheartening:
Apple said “emphatically” that it did not believe in fixed keypads for phones, since the touch screen provided more flexibility for alternative keypads and for various App Store offerings, and that it is portable across geographies and languages, providing significant scale economics.
There is something Apple is not getting, which is that having a physical keyboard is not just another design choice like making a bezel brushed or polished aluminum. Barring the thumb keyboard from iPhones cuts out whole usage scenarios from the iPhone product vision.
The evidence is in plain sight. Today, heavy texters think twice about going with the iPhone. Those with stubby fingers are annoyed at having to type on-screen. Blackberry crack addicts give up on the iPhone and return to Blackberries.
You can prove to yourself using the hallway usability test I conducted with a friend. On your mark, get set, transcribe two sentences from a newspaper simultaneously, one of you with a Blackberry and the other with an iPhone. Even experienced iPhone typers must double-check the work, override the iPhone’s auto-correct feature as necessary, and make corrections. Experienced thumb typists on the Blackberry never have to look back beyond the last letter or two. For an on-screen keyboard, the iPhone’s is excellent, but it’s significantly worse than a real-life, tactile keyboard. No onscreen keyboard has yet to outperform the best thumb keyboard.
Most existing iPhone users won’t consciously miss the on-screen keyboard. They just won’t be typing as much as they would were the device to do it well. (Here, as fan boi of both Apple and the iPhone, I speak from personal experience.)
An Apple ban on thumb keyboards matters because it confers a massive strategic freebie to Apple’s competitors. The others, like the Palm Pre can trumpet their legitimate superiority at sending texts, emails and blog posts. (It was sad to see Blackberry buy into the Reality Distortion Field and stumble with its keyboard-less Storm. A Blackberry without a keyboard is like a lollipop without a stick. The thumb keyboard and it was an advantage, not a liability.)
There is a chance Apple has something up their sleeve. Part of Apple’s design modus operandi is to try and think beyond the current generation of a technology, and implement that. They could, for example, conclude that the thumb keyboard is inelegant and below them and been done, and that the underlying need — for efficient text entry — could be served better (and with more patented Apple PR pizzazz) by, say, voice-to-text. Instead of texting your message, just dictate it and send it.
This is not unheard of: there exist today of human-assisted services for phones that will transcribe your utterances to text quickly and pretty accurately. The voice-recognition approach has great promise for some scenarios, but is not without the usual downsides of voice recognition. Responsiveness and immediacy suffer. Dictated text demands proof-reading for accuracy and correction when there are errors. And whereas texting your message is discreet, speaking it out loud is as conspicuous.
Another “out” for Apple is to make a great physical keyboard as a separate object that snaps onto the iPhone. ”Haha, see? We didn’t desecrate our beautiful device with a ‘fixed keyboard’. It’s removable!” (This do-it-without-doing-it solution would be analogous to Apple finally providing the highly demanded left-mouse button on the mighty mouse by not providing it: instead of a second button, it’s a separate touch-sensitive zone.)
Apple could, of course, be lying about banning the keyboard. They have been known to misdirect in the past. Let’s hope so. As the Palm Pre demonstrates, a slide-out keyboard and a touch UI can coexist beautifully.
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
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