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.