What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.
Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.
When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.
I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.
Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.
Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.
Before we think about the IBM ThinkPad 701, I wanted to flag that I’ve been a Mac user for almost all of my computer-owning adult life. But there have only been a couple of devices that have ever given me PC-envy.
The first one was the IBM ThinkPad 701, my friend at college Jouni whom I lived in halls with at the time had a 701 and the product design blew me away.
The IBM ThinkPad 701 had a carefully designed set of accessories providing a full system of accessories that the road warrior would need including a desk dock, cable adaptors, spare batteries and a detachable disk drive. That was clever and as good as what Apple was doing with with its PowerBook Duo sub notebook. It’s hard to explain how connectivity pre USB was much trickier.
Surprisingly for a computer manufacturer, IBM turned out laptops that had interesting industrial design. They used magnesium alloy shells, titanium and carbon fibre in different model designs over the years and got less credit than they deserved for it.
Richard Sapper, a German product designer based in Italy came up with the design language for the ThinkPad which he modeled on the traditional black lacquer bento box. An ex-automotive engineer with Mercedes Benz Sapper was better known for his work with Alessi and the Tizio lamp for Artemide.
Sapper has kept a connection with the ThinkPad brand and is involved as a design consultant for the current ThinkPad range made by Lenovo.
What made the IBM ThinkPad 701 special was the butterfly keyboard designed by John Karidis solved the problem of making a portable computer with a full-size keyboard. It had a better action than modern laptops in terms typist feedback and was a compact full size keyboard. This was unheard of at the time. It was delicate the way it folded into place as one opened the lid on the laptop and robust enough to cope with travails of mobile working. More design related posts here.
I decided to write on my story onAndroid differentiation after careful consideration. On one hand I didn’t want the companies involved to suffer because one executive had a loud mouth. On the other hand it raised interesting questions about the state of the Android eco-system. So I decided at the time to thinly veil the identities of the different parties.
March 14: I was sat down in the main dining room of the JW Marriott in Seoul having breakfast and minding my own business when I found myself sitting the next table along from a rather loud discussion of a proposal that a US start-up (Flipboard) wanted to make to a major Korean Android handset (Samsung) and tablet manufacturer in a meeting scheduled that day for 2pm.
The crux of the pitch was around Android differentiation opportunities. The major Korean manufacturer (Samsung) has a need for something to provide a clear space. The start-up can help the Korean company sell more devices if they pay for the start-up to develop their software. The software currently is a prominent RSS and social network aggregation as magazine-type reader on iPhone and iPad. The startup wanted funds to develop it specifically for the Korean company’s Android devices.
Samsung should also spend a bit more to offer on a new phone or tablet – a three-month free subscription to a publication like The New York Times, Vanity Fair or People magazine – given the media connections that the start-up partnership development person had: they could broker the deal to make this happen. Would the glorified subscription model be
I also gathered that a similar pitch had already been made to a Taiwanese handset manufacturer (HTC); but not much progress had happened, though this may change as they had a good idea that the start-up was in discussions with Samsung. HTC were apparently keen to talk to Flipboard again.
Now ignoring the lack of common sense in having this discussion in a public place with colleagues when your voice carries across the room I was struck by two things regarding Android differentiation:
The economics of major applications on Android seem to require major financial incentives if this guy had flown half-way around the world to pitch this offer at the same time that SXSWi was on in Austin
Android device differentiation / hyper-competition is becoming an issue, if the head of marketing at a large corporate would spend time to do this meeting and seriously consider the start-up’s proposal. The market must be seriously commoditised and there must be little ‘value-add’ benefits between devices
Now I don’t think that a free three-month subscription is going to move the needle that much, particularly if one looks at how Nokia’s Comes With Music initiative failed to arrest the decline of the world’s largest phone maker. And the implication about the economics of high-quality Android application development was something that concerned me, particularly when I look at the increasing demand for mobile work from clients. More related content here.
Caterina Fake: Fast Growth for a Social App Is a Very Bad Thing – AllThingsD – slow social approach is based on the idea that it’s not just about numbers, its about community social norms and ethos which take time to develop within a group. Fake pioneered building slow social type communities at Slate.com during the dot com era. The slow social way was then perfected by Fake and others at Flickr. You can find Caterina’s personal site here.
Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com – the money quote “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Looked back to the Sony Discman and Sony MDR-A10 headphones when looking to solve personal music in the gym. I have been using my iPod down the gym and found my present headphones inadequate for my needs. I was looking for a set of headphones that were gym friendly, that didn’t completely seal me off from my surroundings, but at the same time stayed in my ears.
I looked at a number of designs and read reviews that put me off every alternative that I found. Eventually I remembered the old headphones that came with my Sony Discman in the early 1990s, the Sony MDR-A10. These were an iconic design in their own way. The headphones were lightweight and the degree of articulation that was in the headband to make it foldable and fit different head sizes made them ideal.
The speakers pointed backward in the ear canal to give a more realistic sound by bouncing it around the ear like you hear normal sounds. The fact that it wasn’t fully closed made it ideal for me to be aware of what was happening around me in the gym.
The real surprise I got was when I found out how much these headphones now go for on eBay: £30. It seems I wasn’t the only one that wanted these design features and the headphones still work well partly because they were made to a more exacting standard in a Sony factory in Japan.
So what do they sound like? Well the MDR-A10 with it’s ‘turbo’ circuitry was designed to work with Sony’s premium Discman range of the early 1990s which have a superior performance in terms of audio output compared to Apple’s iPod. You can only get so much out of headphone drivers this small, but the headphones are good enough to show the limitations in the iPods sound. More about Sony here. More on Sony’s premium Discman range here.
One of the things that I had been thinking about for a while was the way the smartphone handset market; the Android eco-system had the value hollowed out of the business for the manufacturers including the Samsung brand. In some ways this process seemed to mirror what happened in the PC market through the 1990s and into the 2000s.
Home computing
But let’s go back to where it all began. Back at the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, home computing meant having a ‘dumb terminal’ connected to a mainframe or mini-computer at a large corporation or university via a telephone line. Due to the price of local calls in the US versus Europe; it was natural that should develop first in any meaningful way. Even then it was used by a very small number of early adopters. At this time Samsung was better known in Korea for fertiliser and started a partnership with Sanyo to learn about electronics.
However there was a latent demand for personal computing, you had a few geeky counterculture types who had an old mini-computer in a building and provided terminals and accounts to members of the public and community groups free of charge. Outside San Francisco however this latent demand wasn’t being met. The Homebrew Computer Club that held most of their meetings in an auditorium attached to the Stanford Linear Accelerator had a different idea.
In essence they looked to reinvent personal computing by using simpler less powerful hardware. This unleashed a wealth of innovation from the first spreadsheet to at-home stock-trading and eventually World of Warcraft.
Mobile devices are a similar point of reset in personal computing. Many of the tasks that we do from word processing to entertainment don’t necessarily need the amount of computing power that we have. Secondly even this Mac that I am writing the post on probably has lots of unnecessary code that isn’t really required by me. For people who don’t create a lot of content mobile devices from tablets to smartphones are ideal for their needs in many respects.
Beyond this moving forward through simplicity there is another aspect to the the rise of mobile devices that mirrors the PC world; like the Windows Intel eco-system before it – the Android ARM eco-system is becoming commoditised; defined by specification (processor, Android version and screen dimensions). This is what Nokia was afraid of when they decided not to go down the Android route; though the level of control that Microsoft has over Windows Phone hardware specification and and user experience could be argued make the lack of differentiation amongst Android competitors a mute point.
HTC looks as if they have been trying to do something about this, in terms of hardware: purchasing a majority stake in fashion audio brand Beats Electronics LLC and S3 Graphics. This was matched by a similar effort in software with their HTC Sense interface skin with some productivity and communications applications.
Technology marketers haven’t been doing themselves any favours with co-marketing budget type ads like these ones that I took a picture of last year for different Motorola phone models.
In reality, the HTC Sense interface isn’t the differentiator that one would have thought, they haven’t yet used the Beats audio brand in any meaningful way, nor has the S3 graphics come into the marketing mix. Sony Ericsson and Motorola have fared worse and Samsung has come out on top.
Why has Samsung been successful?
I think that this is down to a number of factors:
Samsung like Nokia has built up an extensive effective global logistics and channel network
An extension of this would be Samsung’s relationships with wireless carriers
Samsung can sweat the supply chain largely because it owns the supply chain: it makes LCD screens, memory, ARM procesors for instance. Thus allowing it to compete on price/performance points that many of the other players couldn’t match
In this respect, Samsung’s operational efficiency and effectiveness is similar to Dell in it’s prime (the main difference is that Dell wasn’t a vertically-integrated component manufacturer). Samsung’s head marketer Younghee Lee wants to turn Samsung into an emotional brand rather than a rational one. Historically consumers have known Samsung as making reasonably good products; but many didn’t even realise that the company is Korean rather than Japanese.
The company has a modicum of product design smarts that has allowed it to make in-roads in the television and brown goods markets at the expense of Panasonic and Sony – but it still isn’t operating at the same level of design acclaim as Apple.
Ms Lee’s aspiration for people to feel something about the Samsung brand is at odds with the adverts that the company has been running in the US.
(The embedded video is on Tudou, so will need patience whilst it loads).
The adverts generally follow a pattern:
Attacking iPhone customers as foolish zealots
Demonstrate a Samsung | Android feature
Finish on a rational message
It is the advertising equivalent of the Japanese phrase that ‘the nail that stands up must be hammered down‘. The problem for Samsung is that you don’t get a consumer to switch brands by berating or insulting them; those kind of motivators tend to only work as a line management technique in command-and-control companies (a la Apple).
Secondly, the rational reason doesn’t give a reason to switch from Motorola or HTC to Samsung with the disdain of iPhone customers as a common bond.
If Samsung wants to become a brand that consumers feel passion for, it won’t come through these attack adverts, but from the product design outwards in every part of the customer experience. In this respect Ms Lee’s hands are tied – as the product design and customer experience would need to be raised consistently across the Samsung product range; not just smartphones to make this happen effectively.
It takes years to get this right in an organisation of the scale of Samsung, whilst that is happening Samsung can consider how it can do more appropriate consumer marketing and advertising – I’d suggest by thinking about how to encourage and empower existing Samsung customers to become passionate advocates of the brand.
