I concur with Ars:
We’re past the point where anyone can call the Nintendo Wii a “fad” with a straight face. Nintendo’s console outsold every other system combined, moving 3.81 million units. The Nintendo DS was close behind, with 3.31 million systems sold. The closest competitor? The PlayStation 3 with 1.36 million sold.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change — Charles Darwin
Yes, I love that quote, it makes me sound cool and sure, I’m a little late to the game in having found out about it only a few months ago.
But is it true?
Better yet, in what context is it true and to what degree of change are we talking about? My interests lie in interactive design, web technologies and mobile computing so I’m going to this as the backdrop for the topic of change and mutation.
As an interactive designer I have to be able to adopt, interpret and reject various new technologies, web services and gadgets in order to keep myself relevant/marketable/employed.
I consider myself a ‘hybrid’ designer – one that has an understanding of both the technical and aesthetic sides of a project. Coincidentally, I also consider this one of the most important traits for all interactive designers to have. You almost inherently have to to be one. As a hybrid, you’re always in flux. Jumping from design to technology programs. Testing new web sites and web services. Hybrids are constantly mutating.
Because you don’t always know what the next project is going to require. It could require Flash or XHTML or AJAX or PaperVision3D or XML or MySQL or Java or an iPhone SDK or a Palm webOS SDK or a 3-inch screen or a 30-inch screen. While there’s plenty of fundamentals that are still relevant after 10 years of doing interactive design, I’m constantly having to learn new things, be it design-, technology- or Human Experience-related.
Since there are so many new things happening within the (broad) fields of design and technology I have to cherry-pick which technologies, user interface paradigms and gadgets and therein lies the secret – isn’t how many new ‘things’ you adopt and understand but which ones. Which brings me to the other quote I came across on Ars Technica regarding mutation rates among bacteria:
For the first week or so, normal strains actually outgrew the competition. But, after a few weeks, mutator strains began to pick up helpful adaptations, and quickly came to the fore. By 30 days, only 8 strains (out of 66 initially) survived in culture: all the wild type and low-mutation versions had been driven out by the competition. But so had the strains prone to the most mutations; instead, all the strains fell in a narrow range, with somewhere between three and 47 times the normal mutation rate, with most on the high end of that range.
I think we share a lot in common with bacteria and this is one example from which we can learn. Be open to mutating within your chosen field, but be selective and don’t learn new technologies just for the sake of it. Don’t buy an iPhone if you think it’s crap. You almost need to become a curator of design and technology. You have to know how to spot talent and innovative ideas 10 miles away.
And that brings me to my final point, Apple’s rumored iTablet. We know it’s coming and that’s all we know. Victor pointed me to a a discussion that happened last month on “how developers can proactively prepare their place in a new market”. Smart move if you ask me.
Much smarter, I would say, than preparing for a Microsoft Surface market.
Headlines like this reveal a lot of what’s wrong with consumerism, especially consumerism in technology. I’m used to seeing them on tech blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget, but no one is immune to it, even the Wall Street Journal. “The new Canon camera has 12 megapixels, but when is the 20 megapixel version coming?” “Why is everyone still excited about the iPhone, they haven’t updated it in 3 months?” “I can’t believe they just announced a new Dell Adamo laptop, now the one I bought yesterday is obsolete.” (here’s a tip, jerkoff – the laptop isn’t obsolete, your brain is) “Product X has an automatic Jell-O dispenser, when is Product Y going to have an automatic Jell-O dispenser?”
I’m not suggesting we not strive for progress and improvement in technology. That’s not what this is is about. This is about asking for improvement in the absence of a reason. Megapixels for the sake of megapixels. Speed for the sake of speed. Features for the sake of features. When a product is designed, the goal should always — yes always — be to solve a problem. If I point to a feature on your product and ask why it’s there, and your only answer is “because we could”, you have failed as a designer. Now the fact that you’ve added said unnecessary feature does not mean the product will fail, or the feature is useless. It just means you’ve wasted time solving a problem that doesn’t exist. You’ve added an ornament. Polished the bumper. Put on some lipstick.
So when I see Kara Swisher announce that the Bing app is available on the iPhone, but wonder where the Android version is, I said to myself, slow down girl, take some Ritalin. Let’s not waste internet space with unnecessary HTML, but you have two articles in your title, let’s stay on topic shall we? As far as the second question, ‘where’s the Android version’, she’s asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t where, it’s why. Why hasn’t Microsoft launched a Bing app for Google’s mobile operating system, Android? Perhaps because Apple’s App Store has 100,000 apps and has much more exposure and profitability than Android’s 20,000 app Market? Perhaps it’s easier to develop a better working application for the iPhone platform, than the increasingly splintered Android platform and less refined SDK? In addition to rephrasing the question to make more sense, this also gets back to the ‘feature-matching’ that tech blogs and news outlets love to indulge in.
The irony is that if competing products had the exact same features and the exact same Human Experience and design, they wouldn’t really be competitors because we’d be talking about one product duplicating another in which case we might as well be talking about just one product. UPDATE: I need give credit where it’s due. I remembered where I got the idea for ‘needing reasons for everything in your design’. It comes from a beautifully concise post by Jack Moffett.
via the NYTimes.com:
The underlying problem, Mr. Anderson said, is cultural. “Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn’t have consumer DNA,” he said.
Microsoft, surrender the whole battle for the consumer markets.
Lose the Silverlight, you don’t know how to make emotional experiences. Put that Surface table out on the curb for recycling to pick up. The XBox? Leave the gaming to Apple, Sony and Nintendo. Expression Studio – no, Adobe has the Creative Suite covered. The Zune? Apple has had that covered for a long time, you can trade that in too.
Stick to beige PCs and speadsheets and email programs. Oh, and that Solitaire game my father loves to play, did you make that? That’s a good one. Stick to software – although I do admit I like some of your mice and keyboards, but you don’t make much in profits on those, so drop em.
Oh yeah, Exchange Server – you seem to have a stronghold on corporate email, hold onto that, but stay away from the ‘cloud’. Clouds are pretty high up, and you might get a nose bleed, Google is much better with clouds.
From The Huffington Post:
Amid throngs of bankers arguing that new regulations should not impede on financial “innovation,” Volcker pushed back, blasting Wall Street’s increasingly complex financial products as useless to economic growth. In what seems to have been a shot at exotic securities, he named the ATM cash machine as the most successful financial innovation in the past 20 years, the Times reported.
*This post was sparked by this post on Creative Review.
influencer:
The Rock Drill, Jacob Epstein, 1913-14
influenced:
Battle Droid, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, 1999
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent, but the most responsive to change
-Charles Darwin
If they hadn’t done it with the iPhone, I might consider this post far-fetched:
Steve Jobs said people don’t read any more. But Apple is talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a “new device.” And they’re not just going for e-books and mags. They’re aiming to redefine print.
Exciting times we’re living in.
So after 3 years, I’ve canceled my Sirius Satellite Radio account. Despite my cancellation, I think Sirius offers a great service, just not one that syncs with my lifestyle.
First off, I’ve been back in NYC since 2006, and not driving nearly as much as I was down in Miami for a year. While I could get a docking unit for my home/office, I can also do a lot more things than I could in 2006.
To beat a dead horse some more, the iPhone is the device that has “changed everything” and made Sirius irrelevant to me. Not only can I still listen to my iTunes tracks in the car (as I could before with my iPod), I can also listen to music from last.fm and Pandora …for free. Yes, I can now download the Sirius iPhone app, but I still need a membership.
Sure I’m going to miss Howard Stern, but it’s just not worth $14/month anymore.
I’ve had this post waiting to be written for a few months now. Luckily, the time that has elapsed since the articles I’m referencing have been written haven’t made this post any less relevant. Note that the Wired article I reference has since been updated by their editor due to a lot of reader feedback.
I understand when you’re writing for the media, it’s temping to inject your headlines and article titles with a lot of hyperbole. Depending on who your employer is, many times it gets you more hits (and more money).
I came across this article on Wired.com back in February, Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone.
Pretty bold title …was it true? The writer, Brian Chen cites out-of-whack pricing plans, high and complex standards of users and lack of a TV tuner as the larger hurdles Apple is up against.
Fair enough. I am well aware that Japan has pioneered in many technology markets (but not necessarily innovated) and are far ahead of us in many respects.
But a few months later I came across this article at Electronista, iPhone dominates Japanese smartphone market.
They write:
The iPhone is currently the best-selling smartphone in Japan, at least at retail, according to a recent survey. Gathered by research firm BCN, data from 2,300 stores shows the 8GB iPhone 3G as the most popular smartphone, followed by its 16GB sibling.
and:
The Japanese iPhone is carried by Softbank, which is said to have adjusted its plans to make the product cheaper in terms of fees and hardware. The iPhone may also be benefiting from a relatively static local market, which has little incentive to develop new features beyond items like better cameras, sharper displays and mobile TV.
Now the Wired article was written 26 Feb 2009, and the Electronista article was written on 3 Jul 2009. What I can surmise from these two articles is either:
A) Brian Chen at Wired.com is full of shit and the Japanese don’t hate the iPhone
or
B) Consumer opinion of the iPhone has changed dramatically in the 5 months since the Wired article was written due to Softbank’s ‘adjustments’ mentioned in the Electronista article. Consumer opinion changed so much so that they went uout and bought enough iPhones to make it the #1 smartphone in Japan.
If B) is the case, that’s a pretty impressive 360 degree turn in consumer opinion.
Whatever the case may be, always try be well-informed on news – be it political, technological, social or artistic.
I’ve been addicted to photo booths since college. They’re not as common as they used to be so I’ve been able to keep my addiction under control.
Then I met my wife, and found out she had the same addiction.
UPDATE: If you’re wondering, I took these shots last week in San Francisco at the Museé Mécanique.
The spark of this entry came from a post written by Tomi T Ahonen on the blog Communities Dominate Brands.
In his post, Ahonen blasts Forbes for an article titled, Nokia’s Motorola Moment. The crux of his argument is that Forbes has gotten gotten all the facts wrong, and that most of the innovations being credited to Apple and their iPhone were actually introduced by Nokia years before.
To Ahonen’s credit, the Forbes article does have holes, and there are generalizations that don’t hold up. That being said, I do agree with Forbes that Nokia isn’t bringing it’s A-game with regard to high-end smartphones. Like Motorola a few years ago, Nokia is being reactive to competitors, rather that being proactive and innovative.
Ahonen’s fallacious reasoning stems from his not accepting of this distinction that Professor Jan Fagerberg explained in his 2004 paper, Innovation: A Guide to the Literature:
Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process. Innovation is the first commercialization of the idea.
In a tirade tinged with hostility, Ahonen provides example after example of Nokia being first to introduce various features on mobile devices – equating ‘being the first’ to ‘innovators’:
Forbes claims clearly that Nokia is lagging in innovation compared to Apple’s iPhone. Now, the current iPhone 3GS is yes, a very impressive smartphone. Lets look at a few of the innovations we witnessed in this newest model, one month ago? Compared with the iPhone 3G from a year ago, the “innovative” 3GS upgraded its camera to 3 megapixels. Nokia is clearly not as innovative, as Nokia’s first 3 megapixel cameraphone (and yes, smartphone) was released in 2006. The 3GS now added video recording ability to the camera feature of its phone. When did Nokia’s (smartphone) cameraphones all incorporate this “innovative” ability? in 2004. Apple now offers video recording at 30 frames per second at so-called DVD quality. First Nokia smartphone to have 30 fps DVD quality video recording came out in 2006. The 3GS added MMS picture messaging support in 2009. Nokia’s cameraphones have all been MMS compliant at least since 2003 (proabably 2002, I don’t remember exactly). Apple added Autofocus in 2009. Nokia had autofocus early in 2007.
What Ahonen is clearly not understanding is that more and better features do not mean innovation. Was Nokia the first to have many of the featured mentioned? Absolutely. Did they innovate within the mobile space with these features? No. They might have invented or pioneered with particular technologies, but they did not innovate.
Fagerberg explains this lag between invention and innovation:
Sometimes invention and innovation are closely linked, to the extent that it is hard to distinguish one from another …In many cases, however, there is a considerable time lag between the two. In fact a lag of several decades or more is not uncommon (Rogers 1995). Such lags reflect the different requirements for working out ideas and carrying them out in practice. First of all, while inventions may be carried out anywhere such as, for instance, in universities, innovations occur mostly in firms in the commercial sphere. To be able to turn an invention into an innovation a firm normally needs to combine several different types of knowledge, capabilities, skills and resources.
What Nokia is failing to provide is a unified Human Experience that brings together messaging, maps, email and web browsing and effortless application purchasing and downloading – something that marks Apple’s iPhone as a true innovation in mobile computing. The iPhone continues to lack certain features that some people consider necessities, but what is does do, it does so amazing well.
At this point in the history of technology, its pointless to compete on features alone. My universal remote for my cable TV has every button imaginable on it, but that doesn’t make it innovative. And conversely, just because Twitter has none of the features available on Facebook doesn’t make it any less of the innovation in communication it’s proving to be.
I won’t break down each place Ahonen misses the mark in his argument, but suffice to say he goes on and on with examples of Nokia having bigger screens first on their phones, being the first to have an mobile application store (Ovi), the size of Nokia’s app store being bigger and on and on with precedents made by Nokia. But let’s remember Fagerberg’s ‘lag’ quote from above. Invention doesn’t mean innovation.
And no matter how matter how many features a Nokia phone might have under the hood, they’re pointless without an easy and innovative way to access them.
UPDATE: I just remembered another ‘first’ for Nokia – gaming on mobile devices with their N-GAGE. Another example of pioneering, but not innovating. Once again, the innovation awards goes to Apple with their SDK, App Store and integrated accelerometer all wrapped up in an easy to use system.
