My New Phone & Product Development

Recently, I upgraded my cell phone from a Blackberry Curve to a Motorola Droid X (sorry, RIM), which has given me a surprising glimpse into the future of product development as well as feeding my obsession with comparing things to quantum physics. Here are three important trends that my new phone makes me ponder:

1. Touching is good.
My decision on the Droid was heavily influenced by the touch screen. Even if there were no iPad, touch screens would continue to accelerate into the mainstream and supplant keyboard/mouse, so I wanted to make sure I am protected from that future by getting intimate with a touch interface and related typing methods. Public terminals like ATMs will continue to proliferate, which will force us all to use these new interfaces (and create a serious challenge for germaphobes).

Implications for product developers: If you are designing any product that requires a computer interface, virtual or physical input will become an increasingly difficult decision, especially as the economics of touch screen technology continue to take cost out of the equation. Developers will have to focus much harder on ethnographic customer requirements, contextual scenarios of product use, and many other issues. Customer satisfaction scores will heavily revolve around interface choices.

What comes next? Video game technology is giving us the best glimpse of how future humans will control devices, first with the Nintendo Wii, next with Sony’s Wii copycat, the Playstation Move, and then the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox360. Kinect is the most futuristic of all as it is basically a camera that reads your physical body gestures and uses them to navigate and execute system commands and as a controller for games that replaces joysticks, D-pads and buttons. What I notice is a move towards more real-time, non-symbolic user controls. This past and potential future evolution can most easily be seen with text input and goes something like this: Handwriting > printing press > keyboard > handwriting recognition > touch screen > speech-to-text > thought-to-text. After that, I believe we will evolve beyond text and language for communication, but who knows when.

2. Partial Products, Open Platforms and Mass Customization Redux Part V
Like the PC, the Android phone is a great example of “partial” product development, but with the added twist of a highly robust community of open-source software developers, with much of it free or inexpensive to the user. Many would argue that the
phone is not a complete product in itself, with users expected to complete their own picture with downloaded “apps.” All Android phone manufacturers put a custom user interface on top of the stock operating system, but quality really varies, with HTC providing a delightful experience and Motorola generally panned for its unattractive and clunky implementation. While I find it curious that a company would put a crappy paintjob on its sexy racecar, it is meaningful to examine where certain companies choose to invest in quality and where they hold back, maybe in hopes that the user will find enough apps to get the phone to where they want it to be.

Implications for product developers: The power of platforms has been known for many years, most famously in the car industry. A product platform allows companies to better and more quickly serve market segments, upgrade and improve products, provide many cost savings, and is just plain smart in many other ways. Combined with the proliferation of software in products that never before had a digital component to them, like refrigerators and bicycles, we can expect the trend of more companies providing a partial product base with an aftermarket customization scheme.

What comes next? Over a decade ago there was a lot of noise around “mass customization,” and how Internet and web technologies could give customers the power to create their own personalized version of products. That was a bit ahead of its time, but what we see now in cell phones and app markets is much closer to the original vision. As we digitize more and more of our analog realm, this opens the door even wider for customization of pretty much anything, from the bricks in your house to your toothbrush and anything else you think may not apply, but it will. It’s exactly what they said 10 years ago, but it’s true this time—really.

3. Entangled Human Particles
Networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, combined with cell phones and computer portability, could be described as “basic quantum entanglement at the human level.” In quantum physics, entanglement is characterized as particles whose states are communicated to one another regardless of physical proximity or connection. Similarly, social networking magically broadcasts people’s self reported personal status to their entangled network of friends and family.

Implications for product developers: One of the most difficult jobs of new product developers is creating customer relationships and word-of-mouth marketing, and the onset of social networking is equally stimulating and frustrating the marketing people responsible for it. But the explosion of ongoing, round-the-clock, connection to human networks provides plenty to take advantage of (viral marketing) as well as fear (consumer backlash, negative product reviews).

What comes next? While much more primitive and less miraculous than the subatomic version of entanglement, what we have now could evolve into a human “hive mind” that more closely mimics it. The disturbing direction of this trend is the utter destruction of personal privacy. Social networking seems a permanent cultural fixture that could someday be forced upon us all to participate in full. Talk about your “Orwellian” futures.