Via an article at JKOnTheRun, I’ve been reading, and re-reading the article written by Michael Mace over at Rubicon Consulting. It brings up a good point. If people rarely use a feature, it doesn’t mean that its easy to drop it from a products feature list. People will still want that feature for as long as they like to imagine themselves using it in the future.
Its a classic failure on the consumers part. We all do it because its almost impossible to reign-in those exciting ideas and future scenarios of how you might use a feature. One case in point – webcams. I like the idea of having a webcam on my SH6 but I’ve never actually used it.
Would that theory be the same with a highly targeted and disguised PC? Like a MID for example? Its a PC. Its a SubPC. It will run Windows if you want it to, but will people imagine themselves doing windows-type things on it? If they are marketed correctly and listed under ‘portable media players’ rather than ‘ultra mobile PCs’ I don’t think the customer will expect to be able to edit videos and store 100GB of data on it. My argument is that if you cloak a device correctly, you can get away with a reduced feature set. Of course, the target audience changes and the price-bracket too. A MID won’t sell for $700 if its in the portable media player section. But will it sell for $700 in the notebook section?
Good article though. Worth reading.
