Function Inflation: n. Paying more for stuff you don’t actually want.

This post was inspired by a recent article in The Guardian by Tom Meltzer.

The article points out the absurdities in modern kitchen appliances that offer more functionality than can rationally be used. For example, why would anyone want to set the temperature of a kettle, to the nearest 10°C?

The motivation for the manufacturers is easy to understand.  Commodity appliances is a crowded market space, and you’re unlikely to win the race to the bottom, i.e. be profitable by selling more cheaply than anyone else. So naturally, manufacturers turn to the opposite approach, to sell their goods at a higher price by persuading consumers to pay more in order to get more. It’s premium, see? Premium can be in choice of materials, or cachet of branding, but in this case it is adding more functionality to the device. And adding electronic functionality is especially cheap to do (and cheaper to do badly).

I find a few of the underlying assumptions quite interesting. The first assumption that is worth looking at, is the assumption that adding gadgetry makes the goods more valuable. I can think of a couple of examples where this simply isn’t true.

When I was very little, I was fascinated by all the blank plates that were in my Dad’s new car. I read the user manual to find out more, and saw that each had the footnote “*optional extra”. Resentment ensued. The car manufacturer was taunting me; my car life would have been vastly improved if only we had the switch to do the thingy. Instead, the blank plates were reminders that we couldn’t afford the best, not even second best, that only rich people could afford digital speed displays.

The resentment has stayed, especially now that I try to configure my next car online and find that its price has increased by a third because I’ve added the technology package. Surely, if the objective of all of these options is to make the car more desirable (aka improve profit margins), they should be priced so people will actually buy them, and not invoke ire as naked price gouging? Because as we all know, they simply aren’t worth it.

My second example concerns my favourite gadgeteer: Apple. Who would have thought that if you take functions out, and make the device simpler, you could actually charge more for it? Apple actually puts in a lot of engineering and design effort to ensure that the underlying complexity is hidden, and the device will “just work” (admittedly, only so long as you do what Apple wants you to do with the device, and no more). Apple understands that a) most people want to do things, not buy stuff, and b) most people will pay a premium for nice stuff as long as it still doesn’t get in the way of doing things.

So this brings me to the second assumption that adding features makes the thing better. On many occasions, inflating the feature set, just gets in the way.

Virgin Media has just announced that they are embedding YouTube into the programme guide, so you can select it as you would any other channel. I would argue that the EPG itself gets in the way of simply watching TV. Why does the viewer have to know which channel or web site to go to, when choosing what I want to watch is hard enough? Embedding YouTube into the EPG is function inflation because it doesn’t actually make the product better.

Why do we react strongly to inappropriate gadgetification? I don’t think it’s reactionary, anti-progress sentiment. I think it’s because it highlights an imbalance between how manufacturers treat their customers, and how we would like to be treated – a wallet versus someone with desires. Function inflation shows a lack of understanding of what the customer wants, and not spending the effort to understand the customer just shows a lack of respect.

Consumer tech and the greying population.

My wife’s grandmother was 93 last week. She’s lived her childhood through one world war, was an ambulance driver in another, worked the switchboards in one of the first telephone exchanges, and until recently, was sprightly enough to deliver meals to housebound elderly twenty years her junior. She has a remarkable story to tell, one that I hope she will share with my children when they are old enough and wise enough to ask her to tell it.

She also experienced the greatest rate of technological change known by the human race, and seems to be happily unaffected by it. Her tech cravings are satisfied by a ten year-old TV that can be turned up really loud. This leads me to wonder how tech will affect me as I grey. Tech to prolong life, improve quality of life, augment and re-invent real life, all of this will be mundane by the time I get old. But will I be belligerently hanging on to quaint Apple iProducts of today because that was the last thing I understood how to switch on (“it just works”)?

The key trend is the blurring between the technology and the objective. When I went to university and learnt about Von Neumann architecture, technology was still the province of a few learnéd acolytes. You had to know the unpublished intricacies of the postscript file format just to get a printout the way you wanted it, and had to wait an hour or more for a really complex job. Technology was therefore by necessity, an end, not just a means.

The great change since then is that technology is relegated to a mere means to achieving your goal, and does not need to be understood to be used. If you want to print out that email, you can do so directly from your phone, whilst you’re sitting on the bus. Knowing how the printer is connected to your home network, and from there to the wider world web, is no longer important, thankfully. The only skill you have to master is to know what it is that you want to print.

So my hope when I become a silver surfer is that technology ceases to exist… at least as a separate skill that I have to master. Because I’ll have had my fill of mastering new skills, and I’ll need all my energy to be grumpy at you for turning the TV down.

3D is dead. I’m trying hard not to laugh.

“The view from CES 2013: 3D is dead”. It’s not the first time the death knell has been sounded, so I don’t think this time it’ll be forever either, it will go into that twilight of undead technology that will rise again once our collective memory dims. However, we’ll get some immediate respite from every movie release needing to be in 3D, perhaps fewer headaches, and I won’t have emptied my wallet on another new gadget.

Don’t get me wrong, when 3D works, it works beautifully. Cirque du Soleil, Premier League Football and Super Mario Bros. all work better in 3D than normal. However in most cases, 3D fails the very basic rule of good programming, it doesn’t help tell the story. There are too many examples where 3D is a distraction, is the whole spectacle, is the end in itself.

If 3D doesn’t help the story, then why did the movie industry, TV manufacturers, get so exercised? Because it was a chance to force the technology upgrade cycle early, to get consumers to buy the next more expensive TV before they were ready to do so. Consumers didn’t react well to the avarice, and voted with their wallets. For this reason, 3D ($D?) may well be seen as the moment the industry jumped the shark.

I need to stop laughing, because the next big advance in consumer tech will be Ultra HD or 4k resolution. Again, I’ve seen this work beautifully; a simple scene of people crossing a busy downtown Tokyo intersection was mesmerising. The story was in the detail. And again, this advance promises to empty my wallet and bring joy to TV manufacturers . I can’t help myself, oh yes please, I want.

And that’s the point of advancing technology. There’s always be the next great thing which geeks like me will want. It’s just that sometimes, the next great thing will be entirely different from the next big thing that everyone, not just a geek, wants. To be successful, the trick is knowing the difference between the two.