Predicting the impact of an innovation
Monday, November 9th, 2009 | commentary, product vision
Over at Steve Portigal’s blog there was a discussion of France Telecom which has been introducing high quality audio to cellular voice calls. (This is #7 on my 10 UI Wishes for 2008.)
A commenter asked, and I paraphrase, “The question is, will people care? Is existing voice quality ‘good enough’ that a jump in quality won’t matter that much?”
What is important about this question is that it gets to the product vision skill of being able to distinguish revolutionary technologies from those that only sound revolutionary.
One guy seemed to think HD audio was radical, “This is a bigger innovation than cameras on handsets or app stores for the industry.”
Is he right? Here was my response on Steve’s blog:
Will customers care about HD audio? I like to think about these things in terms of needs. The HD audio people cited in the NYTimes thinks that this is more revolutionary than the camera in the mobile or the app store.
The guy is wrong. The cellphone camera and the app store are important because they enable the satisfaction of a host of new needs and scenarios. You can now email a picture of a sinking airplane from a boat on the Hudson river. The innovation is valuable to customers because more real needs are being met. Simple as that.
HD audio,while difficult to do and very welcome, is still an incremental innovation to customers, because it merely does a better job of addressing needs that were adequately covered for the last 70 years.
In the market, incremental refinements like HD Audio are not irrelevant, but they tend to be tie-breakers. Given two otherwise equal offerings, a customer might as well choose the more refined one.
Eventually the competition responds, and the refinement becomes table stakes for all players. But until the advantage is neutralized, the company with the more refined solution has bragging rights that can distract customers from more important unmet needs.
It may be fairly obvious that HD audio is a nice-to-have, because we are all intimate users of telephony. However this way of thinking — connecting the technology back to scenarios and needs — applies to less familiar ideas. It’s a useful way to break through reality distortion fields and make predictions about the true relevance of exciting looking technologies to customers.
2 Comments to Predicting the impact of an innovation
It’s interesting to see how audio is less significant than higher visual resolutions. Perhaps the reason is that we tend to “stare” at audio a lot less than we stare at visual sources. Mostly, if audio is crappy but decipherable, it is good enough. But we almost always re-examine visual elements to try to get more information. It often has multiple levels. So, higher quality provides more.
The “table stakes” argument is interesting, but I think it’s often incorrect. Markets can choose clearly inferior products (like VHS) because there are some “other” qualities that are rated higher instead (like it being a ‘whole’ product in the sense meant by Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”).
Paul.
Thanks, Paul!
VHS wasn’t actually “inferior”. It’s true that image quality was not as good as Betamax, but it was good enough for consumers, and that’s all that mattered.
What customers needed more than an improved image was recording duration, and VHS satisfied that need better than Betamax, which had to scramble to catch up.
The overall profile of needs for VHS more closely matched what customers needed than Betamax.
Philip
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December 7, 2009