Would SOME Electronics Business PLEASE Actually Read The Web?
Customer Voices Are Hearable Now. Duh.
Hello Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Kenwood, Alpine, Bose, Apple, the RIAA, all the other EU and American brands, and a thousand skilled China and Far East manufacturers: The Internet is here. "Market Research" now takes only maybe two or three-hours of serious Googling to do, on even the most complex product/service proposition. Your customers are online, repeatedly telling you -- loudly -- what they wish the hell you would build or offer or sell. Why don't you listen?
What The Online Voices Are Saying
Dear Technology Businesses: We are universally opposed to being trapped into proprietary revenue generating schemes on content and features. We love simple little devices and services that do one thing extraordinarily well. We like well designed, and well thought-through products and services. We love little doodads and geegaws that truly make our lives easier. We like small, light, and thin. But, we like a sense of weight, and solid engineering, too. We hate being forced to pay new money to update an old product to do new things... or worse, to do the same things we have become accustomed to doing. We hate being viewed as pawns in some manufacturer's greater profit creation aspirations. We love being seen as the most important element in your universe. We like being listened to, and, you can listen to us by spending 3-minutes on Google.
Why don't you?
Why do we have big-ass bulky cell phones with a zillion freakin' menus and features that get in the way of the four features we actually use 99% of the time? Why do we have song files, CDs and DVDs that cannot be legally saved, stored, or used on our choice of devices? Why do we have to endure the high-prices and high-feature burdens of a "high end" cell phone, in order to get a good looking, thin and light handset? Why can't you just build us a simple little handset that is also thin and light? Why is hooking up an HDTV system more complex than configuring a network server? Why must we pay extra to move files from our phone to our PC, when the two products are sitting right next to each other on our freakin' desk?
And, don't even get me rolling on PCs and software and the multitude of interface and usability problems I have to put up with on that front.
Attention Tech Business Leaders
The days of the Focus Group are long dead. You do not need to go grab a hundred people at random at the local shopping mall and herd them into a room to 'test reactions.' You have millions of living, breathing, very motivated buyers right here on the web, all wanting you to listen to what we have to say to you.
Why the hell don't you listen to us?
Comments
So, they are slow to understand. Apple's culture always has been about this so they arrived at the right time & place while Sony is still releasing some proprietary format (UMD, ATRAC-3) and just thinkihng we'll accept whatever when Mp3's are the only digital audio format we accept worldwide - something out of their control.
As for DRM, the problem is that every large corporation is so interwined with everyone else, they cannot offer a real 'hack,' thankfully we have smaller companies (as long as they are not bought up) who can fly under the radar like the DVD ripper guys or even EyeTV (record and send along - no DRM). The problem is NOT the electronics comapnies who would sell an electronic hari kari kit if they tought it would sell but rather the media companies who now believe that everything they release is theirs forever on Earth 1.0 and a day - never mind iot's ecause we live in a free society that allows them to benefit (if you were the ASCAP or Universal of Afghanistan, just how much would you be bringing in?)
I make my living these days basically preaching the obvious to guys who should already know... pitching my butt off, relentlessly trying to push manufacturers into doing what they should actually have the sense to already know they should be doing -- the things in this rant I posted.
Every now and then, I find one, and a cool, customer-driven product design gets to market.
As for DRM/RIAA and the rest of the dummies clinging so fiercely to the Sears And Roebuck business model for recorded media... sigh... I would love to have the ear of those guys for a bit, and be able to urge them to embrace inevitable change. Instead, they are invoking legal mechanisms to artificially protect their buggy whip sales. And, that's just dumb.
What actually set me off was once a month or so I take a day and just go shopping, looking at store after store of electronics goods, to refresh my mind as to what's there for people to choose. And man... what a sea of misconceived junk, for the most part!