Why does all tech have to be a * Killer?
I just realized why something annoyed me all these long years - that in technology there’s always a new product out that’s a something killer. Most recently, everything is an iPhone killer, take RIM’s new Blackberry 9000, for example. Why does a product always have to be that? It’s so stupid.
When the iPhone came out, was it a something killer? No. It was just the iPhone, it was a new way of thinking about how a phone should operate and be. Apple didn’t say, huh, wow the Blackberries are doing good, let’s set out to kill that. Or that Treo sure has a lot of apps, we need to be able to match that. Instead they said, let’s make the best phone/internet/media device we can - let’s see what problems there are in that space and what we’d like to do and try and come up with a device we’d want to use. And lo and behold, the iPhone, something that even if you don’t want to use, is inarguably something that at least many other people want to use.
I think a lot of this comes down to our obsession with feature lists. It is easy to look at competition, come up with a checklist of features and then check them all off, add a few and pow, that must be a competitor killer. I mean, it has all the same features and more! But ‘ware there be stagnation there - all it does is give you more of the same, sure there are some improvements, but when all that’s being done is checklist comparisons there’s no evaluation of intangible qualities. There’s no reevaluation of new ways to do the same old things.
Of course in many sectors of technology there is a certain saturation and they behave like a zeroish sum game, so that any new competition will succeed at least in part by taking marketshare from the competition. But I think there’s a subtle approach in saying, crap, Widget X is doing awesome, we need a Widget X killer! And saying, huh, Widget X is good, but I just am not satisfied by it. Let’s see what we can do. I think there’s a lot of the former going on and I, personally, would like to see more of the latter.
I’m just saying. It struck me while I was reading that Alley Insider piece, but maybe I’m wrong? Selective memory?
