Tired With Gadgets
We live in a world, where marketing and hype exceeds the reality. This once was a "new school" of business. Now it looks like it is more and more the old school. People are tired with underperforming gadgets, promising to deliver excitement and joy. More often than ever, frustration is what they really deliver.I wrote about Windows Vista a number of times. A great example of a premature, overhyped product. Poor performance, and no meat, only the Aero Glass and Blue Screens (recently my laptop showed a blue screen of death reporting an exception in the Microsoft Winsock driver... Well I know Microsoft used to blame third party device drivers for the crashes.... But hey, bugs in the winsock library?... that means the product launch was way premature. Just a perfect example of what happens to a company when it is run by a bottom - line focused COO...
Windows Media Center Living Room PC? I spent two days last week trying to set up the video drivers to display correctly on my 1080p TV. In the meantime have just learned the Media Center is nothing more but a small application running on top of ordinary Windows XP... Hype, hype, hype...
My Samsung SGH-i600 smartphone cannot handle situation when it is paired with more than one Bluetooth handsfree device. When I pair it with a headset, it does not see my car handsfree and vice versa.
The Nokia N800 has its ups and downs with avery new firmware release. It looked almost fixed three weeks ago (GMail started working fine), but then again the Google Reader shuts it down. I know this may be a bug in the Reader application itself, in the browser, in the OS or even a hardware problem, but all I get is frustration with such promising device.
Tomorrow the Mobile World Congress starts in Barcelona and companies are racing with press releases. SonyEricsson introduced the Experia X1 Windows Mobile device. Looks great, but an hour ago when I tried to see the details of the HPM-77 handsfree accessory, I got 404 Page Not Found after clicking the link on Sony's page. Frustration again. Why the rush?
The bottom line for today is people pay more and more attention to the overall quality and experience. And there are just a few companies understanding that. Apple is the number one here. Look at the prices of the overpriced Apple products and try to figure out why people prefer to pay a premium for them... Quality and reliability and ease of use. You can charge a high premium for these and consumers will pay and will be happy.
When talking about Apple, yes, there's quality and ease of use. And there's a lot of hype too.
ReplyDeleteWhen you think about software and in reliability-versus-buzz war you look for example for the former side I'd point Total Commander. Extremely reliable and useful application with no buzz at all. The downside is they don't get much attention.
Great successes are usually made of buzz built over good quality. But you're right when you point buzz alone doesn't work well in vast majority of cases.
BTW I could never figure out why on Earth would you use the Total Commander for? I decided to learn the new Windows (95) File Explorer and since then any need to use the TC have disappeared...
ReplyDeleteOK, why the heck would you learn File Explorer when Total Commander is already familiar to you?
ReplyDeleteI know I can do anything I can do with TC with FE. My friends even had a bet about that and FE guy won. But why bother?
People don't like to learn new ways to do things. That's the case of File Explorer and that's the case of Apple's one-button mouse too.
I think we go away from subject...