Are incremental improvements enough?

21 September 2009

assets/images/BlogImages/Wordprocessor.jpg

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference saw its fair share news coverage. Amongst all the press coverage surrounding the launch of the new iPhone 3G s, two items stood out for me. The first was the new ‘oleophobic coating’ (a godsend for those of us with oily fingers) and straightforward ‘cut and paste’ functionality.

There are others (the new S is said to be much faster than its predecessors), but there’s nothing really radical in there. I wondered then whether making incremental improvements is enough to sustain market share?

It brought to mind the launch of WordStar back in the very early 1980’s. At the time, it was a revelation. It represented a big shift in document ‘production’ away from the challenges of the typewriter to something not much short of revolutionary.

"...with WordStar, you have a true screen image of what your printout will look like before you print it! With WordStar, you'll erase, insert, delete and move entire blocks of copy."

It left previous incarnations well behind and finally killed off the humble typewriter. WordStar was built on technology, and didn’t go much further than that but it worked. At the time, it didn’t need bells and whistles, just the raw capability to produce better documents more effectively.

In the end however the technology that WordStar was built on wasn’t sustainable. It changed too quickly. In the end, other manufacturers started to add more and more functionality to their products and eventually overtook it. WordStar’s demise in the mid 80’s was largely due to Microsoft Word. Microsoft’s success was rooted primarily in a better product: they ‘hid’ the technology and started to focus on ‘features’. WordStar carried on building on their technology that had served them so well until then but to no avail.

Building on this success, Microsoft’s idea was extended to include more and more features (with their ensuing benefits). Consider the screenshot below of Microsoft Word 2003:

Every possible feature was been built into this SKU to make it a product that stood out from the crowd. In fact it had so many features, they would (if you chose) barely leave any room to actually type; to do the thing you actually want to do. Microsoft entered a ‘feature war’ with the likes of Apple and Star Office – its products became bloated and overweight. Developers won the day and they lost sight of what their product was actually for (now rectified with Office 2007).

To be fair, we know that people do buy on features; they’ll go to comparison sites to compare product features; they’ll look at boxed products and compare one list of ‘bullet points’ against another. They’ll probably end up buying something based on features. But would a huge raft of features encourage a user to defend it in the face of criticism? Probably not.

The bottom line is that focusing only adding more and more product features is not the best way to sustain a proposition. So what is?

Coming back Apple, consider this quotation from Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc:

“The really great person will keep on going and find the key underlying principle behind the problem and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works”

I think these words go to the heart of any innovation and customer experience. When we consider also that Steve Jobs said this in 1984, we can see that the success behind the iPhone was no fluke.

Clearly, technology is and will be central to what a product is, which makes the inclusion of things like oleophobic coatings appropriate, but what makes them work is that they are building on something brilliant – something with a great ‘underlying principle’.

The companies that can do this are few and far between. Most struggle to get beyond incremental improvements to what already exists which does not make them sustainable. They’re easily copied and seldom profitable.

I get excited when we work on assignments that focus on exploring the ‘underlying principle’ – whether it’s technology, mobile apps, financial services it doesn’t matter; trying to unpick the underlying principle is where the gold lies. If the brief steers us away, we try hard to steer them back – at least in part. If we can’t, we look forward to doing a great piece of research. And doing it again a year later.

Write a comment

Required fields are marked with *.