One thing that has always been of interest to me about the tech community is that when some new product or service comes along, there are invariably members of the peanut gallery that will pipe up with the comment that “that’s not new!”
Most recently this came to my attention in the context of an article about some new tires that the military is going to be using. The tires are not based around compressed air, but a type of honeycomb lattice inside the tire. The benefit is that the tires are essentially bulletproof. This is a big deal because all armored vehicles that are not tanks still use regular old inflated tires, which substantively diminishes the defensibility of the vehicle in the field.
What struck me about the article was how amazing it was to me that this problem had not been solved before, but that I was glad they finally had some solution.
The second thing that struck me was a comment by someone that “its not new.”
Now I have no idea. Maybe this tire has existed for twenty years and the military likes having the tires shot out of their vehicles. Perhaps this really is an example of procurement foolishness. I am no expert on tire construction. But my gut tells me these tires are new, and pass some critical threshold of usability and usefulness.
But the larger issue is that almost invariably, with any new product there are people that will say “we have been doing that for years.”
I find these people fascinating.
It’s the kind of people that claimed that C was not new because they had been programming in assembler for years. It is the people who claimed there was no need for graphical operating systems because we already had the “oh so much better” command line. It is the people (like cmdrTaco on Slashdot) who claimed that there was no difference between the iPods and the earliest music generation.
These are the people that invariably have no sense of what most of us care about or why products are or are not useful. And their background chorus at the launch of almost anything interesting is always a curiosity to me.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
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5 comments:
I've heard this said before.
Just kidding. Great point.
I think this phenomenon is a reaction (well, overreaction) to the tendency to hype everything as "unprecedented," which is a bit obnoxious and generally used for marketing purposes (rather than truth). For example, the iPod is not the category-maker, the Walkman was, no matter the fervent wishes of the Jobs-ians.
Realistically, "new" is not binary, it's a continuum; the iPod is "somewhat new," as it brings added functionality and convenience to an existing category. C was "somewhat new," extending the usability of the computer by large magnitudes (but the computer was programmable before).
I see the point of the "background chorus," though, no matter how extreme they seem to be. The business school from which I graduated (University of Chicago) has just received a huge donation. In return, the school has been "rebranded," and, as our dean would have us believe, has finally been put on the map. Of course, that's ridiculous, this is a school with 110 years of accomplishments - the "new" name hasn't created any "new"-ness at all, at least, not until the money is spent productively. To argue that "Chicago Booth" is not a new school, no matter how obvious that may seem to be to me, is to swim against the tide of the hype-meisters.
Androcass,
The problem is that "new" cannot be measured by the amount of new material in something. I can tell you as a product designer that everything is incremental, but small things make big differences to users. Assembly language was a language just like C, But C radically improved developer impact and increased the number of people that could participate. So new cannot be measured by the additional "weight difference" between the goods, but by the qualitative assesment of the target audience for the product.
Hank:
I absolutely agree with what you're saying. But I believe that some of the resistance from the "background chorus" comes from the difference between push and pull.
If millions of people perceive the iPod as "new," then it is (and I believe that's the point you're making). C was "new" to the people who could now program, those for whom assembler was too arcane.
But that determination is something for people to decide, not the marketers. There is a sizable group (by no means a majority) who resist the imposition of "newness" by going the other way; "Don't tell me Windows is so great, I can do everything on the command line faster and better."
It's a matter of extremes, I guess, as the gullible square off with the intransigent. I prefer the thoughtful, middle course myself, neither embracing something simply because I'm told it's new, nor rejecting something until I've had the chance to evaluate it.
I simply have to agree with Androcass... Most of the time somebody yells about something "new" that has been done a thousand times before on different platforms or in a different context.
Maybe this is by the same reason why Kaizen works. People want to see something new. They dont want to see "oh here someone improved this old system a little bit and now its somehow a bit better".
Noone will sell a pretty good Product to you by telling you "we sold it the last 50 Years nearly unchanged it cant be that bad", he will allways tell you "just yesterday we changed X and Z and now its superior to any Version that has been released"
I on my side try to keep the line between extremes like calling Twitter a slow and buggy Version of IRC or using every goddamn Geektoy outthere that has more Pixle/Gigabyte/Whatever then the previous.
New/improved things sometimes ARE better and old things can still BE good. Thats something we have to keep in mind.
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