Amphibious
Writings about the business of design and strategy.
The Hardware Gets All the Glory
In my earlier post on Apple as the Zeitgeist company, Monika makes an interesting observation in her comment:
We all love all things Apple and "couldn't" do without our MacBooks and IPhones anymore. Really? In the end, Apple still makes products. Sure great ones, but not irreplacable ones. However, if Google would cease to exist tomorrow my world and probably the world in general would shut down as well. Google and similar companies do not produce anything, they just enable me to do what I need to do as a knowledge worker and want to do as a digital native.
I find this a fascinating phenomena: we as humans still emotionally gravitate much more toward physical objects than we usually do to nebulous digital experiences or other service components, almost regardless of the relative value of each on an objective level.
This is something I talk about in the chapter on Convergence in my book, as it is a critical thing to understand when creating ecosystems that combine hardware, software and service elements. I've seen it happen more than once where a company wanting to create such an ecosystem gets hung up on the hardware, but ignores the software or service pieces, or the background enablers that are vital to making the ecosystem work well. The hardware hogs the spotlight at the expense of the other pieces, I think because it is so visceral. The challenges in bringing the other less concrete pieces to life are important, but less immediate. Frankly they can often be quite dull.
In the book I make the analogy of trains. People love trains, especially my fellow Englishmen. Steam trains in particular hold a fascination because they seem so alive. Today we are so used to our technologies working invisibly or microscopically that it is a real treat to see pistons driving wheels, clouds of steam billowing out, and hear lots of loud and wonderful noises as the locomotive powers along.
You don't see the same level of interest in railroad track, switching stations, or timetables, however. The in-your-face hardware gets all the attention.
Trains as products are fascinating - but worthless. But trains as part of a railway ecosystem are tremendously valuable.
So it goes with most ecosystems. It's fine for consumers to focus their attention on the hardware, but if you're developing an ecosystem you can't indulge that bias. This is the mistake we see clients make when they say they want the iPod/iPhone of their industry - they forget that it's the ecosystem that makes them a success, the hardware is just the hook. You must pay attention to every detail, no matter how invisible or dull it may be to the end consumer. Only when all those details are taken care of (and believe me Apple sweats those details more than just about anyone else) will the ecosystem really sing.
[The picture above, by the way, is one I took on the platform of a German train station. Taking a train in Germany is a completely different experience than in the US, and they've really got the whole thing dialed. The platforms are much longer than most of the trains, so this poster shows you where your train will arrive relative to your position on the platform, and there are several of these posters at different points on each platform. While the German train system is generally quite high-tech, here they went with a decidely low-tech solution - a piece of red string taped to the poster to show where you are standing in relation to the train and the different classes of cars (shown in different colors). Wonderful.]
Blogs
Recent Comments on Amphibious
design mind Newsletter Subscription
Categories on Amphibious
- Apple (11)
- Facebook (4)
- Google (12)
- Microsoft (7)
- MySpace (3)
- UI (3)
- automotive (3)
- bing (2)
- culture (3)
- design (4)
- design research (6)
- disruptive innovation (3)
- economy (3)
- gm (3)
- iPad (4)
- iPhone (12)
- industrial design (2)
- innovation (12)
- innovation x (5)
- nexus one (3)
- smartphone (3)
- social networking (6)
- sustainability (3)
- twitter (4)
- user experience (5)
- user needs (3)
I personally was thinking
Ralph Schneider - February 3, 2010
I personally was thinking about this point coming just from the other side of that process. As a raw material producer i was thinking about the relevance of todays user experiences if no hardware would exist. What is the relevance of hardware in context of the system? I fully agree on your point that one piece itself would not have that meaning. But on the other hand it is an interesting point that people do address so much into a piece of hardware and not into all the apps that make this passive piece alive. What is human being without physics?
I guess someone could call hardware being overrated. And perhaps at the moment it could be true as hardware is for most people just a black box after the surface.
But in respect to our our always so caveman like reactions on all these nearly border-less systems, where the meaning of it is even greater than the first experience and than there is only this tiny well made plastic box. It is just a sand-corn. It is still the only island to address it all to.
As coming just from the other side of the road, sometimes i guess we are really getting very little reward to provide neutral materials that can be used to build cocoons for great applications which generate very rich social interactions.
But a good thought to think who should get the value for all that and if the value is positioned right at the moment. I like that. Thanks for that thought.
Best regards Ralph
Adam, thank you for that
Monika - February 4, 2010
Adam, thank you for that interesting follow-up. Now I am looking forward to your book even more.
It is fascinating how little we understand of all the complex systems on which we built our modern, digital, on-the-go lives. To me the most interesting thing with hardware is that many times we only seem to really recognize it when it doesn't work as we expect it to. That is also when we maybe realize the comlex system behind it. Also, those failures are very often a great chance for people to come up with unexpected solutions or workarounds that might lead to improvements for the whole ecosystem.
Here is an example: I am glad you had such a good experience taking the train here in Germany, however, unfortunately that is not always the case. The trains are more often late than not, platforms or the order of rail car changes and sometimes the front half of the train will go to a different destination than the back. The result is confusion, anger and frustration on the customers' side.
Most of the time delays and changes are not due to bad planing on the Bahn's side of course, but to those unforeseeable switch problems somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The problem is, however: As a customer I don't know about that, all I know is that my train will be late and that I will miss my meeting and that I hate the train and will never take it again (at least not until next week that is).
I recently led a design workshop with the former CEO of Deutsche Bahn, who talked very impressively about the kind of problems that such a complicated ecosystem constantly faces. The problem for them is not so much on the technical side. The German railway system is already pretty high-tech and many of the remaining failures are simply unavoidable. Their problem is information and communication: They know what's wrong and that they are doing their very best to get it fixed asap, but their customers don't. I supposse many travelers, including myself, would get less angry if they had real-time information about the railway problem and its solution and could let their business partners or family members know how long it will take.
To me, as a customer, it is important that the system works, not so much how. I do want to be assured, however, that the company in question knows every last detail about their system.
System theory
Monika - February 4, 2010
Adam, thank you for that interesting follow-up. Now I am looking forward to your book even more.
It is fascinating how little we understand of all the complex systems on which we built our modern, digital, on-the-go lives. To me the most interesting thing with hardware is that many times we only seem to really recognize it when it doesn't work as we expect it to. That is also when we maybe realize the comlex system behind it. Also, those failures are very often a great chance for people to come up with unexpected solutions or workarounds that might lead to improvements for the whole ecosystem.
Here is an example: I am glad you had such a good experience taking the train here in Germany, however, unfortunately that is not always the case. The trains are more often late than not, platforms or the order of rail car changes and sometimes the front half of the train will go to a different destination than the back. The result is confusion, anger and frustration on the customers' side.
Most of the time delays and changes are not due to bad planing on the Bahn's side of course, but to those unforeseeable switch problems somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The problem is, however: As a customer I don't know about that, all I know is that my train will be late and that I will miss my meeting and that I hate the train and will never take it again (at least not until next week that is).
I recently led a design workshop with the former CEO of Deutsche Bahn, who talked very impressively about the kind of problems that such a complicated ecosystem constantly faces. The problem for them is not so much on the technical side. The German railway system is already pretty high-tech and many of the remaining failures are simply unavoidable. Their problem is information and communication: They know what's wrong and that they are doing their very best to get it fixed asap, but their customers don't. I supposse many travelers, including myself, would get less angry if they had real-time information about the railway problem and its solution and could let their business partners or family members know how long it will take.
To me, as a customer, it is important that the system works, not so much how. I do want to be assured, however, that the company in question knows every last detail about their system.