“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…”
Arthur C. Clarke… "indistinguishable from magic" = very confusing for analogists
"Developers looked down on designers because their thinking seemed fuzzy and unstructured, their tastes arbitrary. Designers felt that developers were unimaginative, conservative, and given to rejecting their designs out of hand without trying to find a way to make them work. Because programming was inexplicable to designers, they had no way of assessing a developer's insistence that their designs were unprogrammable..."
Fred Moody, "I Sing the Body Electronic"
“… despite the best efforts of remarkably talented people, most attempts to create successful new products fail. Over 60% of all new-product development efforts are scuttled before they ever reach the market. Of the 40% that do see the light of the day, 40% fail to become profitable and are withdrawn from the market. By the time you add it all up, three-quarters of the money spent in product development investment results in products that do not succeed commercially…”
Clay Christiansen, Innovator’s Solution
“… the Kodak Fun saver. This was a product to be hired when customers needed to save memories of fun occasions but had forgotten to bring a camera. The Funsaver camera competed against nonconsumption. Customers whose basis of comparison was to have no pictures at all were delighted with the quality of this solution to saving their fun…”
Clayton Christiansen, Innovator’s Solution
“A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn’t…”
Douglas Adams… he didn’t mean a Smart Phone
“A Starbucks principle: people aren’t paying for the coffee, they’re paying for the break – they’re paying for the kind of time (i.e. relaxing, not at their desks) they get to spend at Starbucks. If you think about the typical commuter who is spending an hour plus in his or her car, and remember that if that person has a family, car time is probably the only time in the day they get to spend by themselves, then you understand why people are price-inelastic when it comes to mitigating traffic hell and enhancing ‘me’ time…”
JC Herz
“Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work…”
Marc Prensky
“Ever wonder why ‘sales-cycle’ has become normal parlance in industry even for purchasers when what really really REALLY matters is potential users and their ‘buying cycle’? Article of evidence #1001 that we may have become too supplier-oriented in the adoption of new technologies…”
Pip Coburn
“Every product according to its maker is easy to use. And for the folks who designed it, I’m sure it is. But, say, what you will, so many products that should be easy to use, just aren’t. This ‘exasperation factor’ – the sigh you heave when you hit that brick wall – undoubtedly causes many would-be buyers of a demo package just to leave, never to return. Still, vendors seem to be blissfully unaware of the opportunities that they are losing…”
Kevin Tolly, Network World
“From what I have shown here, it seems clear that this shift requires acknowledging the necessity of an open dialogue between the users and the designers of the technology based on mutual human engagement. The computer will become a transparent medium, disappearing into the interaction it enables, only if we all realize that we engage in a communicative act each time we hit a keystroke, move a mouse, and tomorrow, maybe, touch the other side of the interface…”
Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping
“Great content is really about communication…”
David Isenberg
“He believed that the designer should be like a benevolent illusionist who would make his illusions transparent to his audience while performing them: the desktop illusion, this ‘magical paper’ that the personal interface became, aimed at creating an iconic interaction transparent for the user and under control of the designer…”
Regarding Alan Kay form Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping
“I prefer ‘technology push’ – find an interesting new technology and try to come up with uses for it. ‘A solution looking for a problem’ is supposed to be a terrible epithet, but in my experience it works…”
legendary IC designer Carver Meade in MIT’s Technology Review… Yikes! …we don’t expect the change to come from the inside!
“In large measure the high casualty rate of knowledge-based, and especially the high-tech, entrepreneurs themselves. They tend to be contemptuous of anything that is not ‘advanced knowledge,’ and particularly of anyone who is not a specialist in their own area. They tend to be infatuated in their own technology, often believing that ‘quality’ means what is technically sophisticated rather than what gives value to the user…”
Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
“In Star Trek, no one really uses or wears small screens (much); they have moved on. They mostly approach any screen on any deck of any ship and boldly ask a computer to tell, find, and show. I think a similar regime is about to be engineered for you and me…”
Peter Cochrane, Uncommon Sense
“In the case of electronics, the greatest danger which faces the glamorous new companies in this field is not that they do not pay enough attention to research and development but that they pay too much attention to it… they are growing up under the illusion that a superior product will sell itself…”
Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia
“Just remember: you’re not a ‘dummy,’ no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who, though technically expert, couldn’t design hardware and software that’s usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it…”
Walter Mossberg
“Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea into every nook and cranny of the organization…”
Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia, 1975
“Somewhere along the way the promise of the technological revolution to make our lives easier is not being delivered…”
Gerald Kleisterlee, CEO Philips… Financial Times, September 14, 2004
“Technology Happens…”
Intel’s Andy Grove, Time Magazine’s 1997 Man of the Year
“The high-tech industry is in denial of a simple fact that every person with a cell phone or a word processor can clearly see: Our computerized tools are hard to use…”
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum
“We are a very technology-driven industry, and a lot of the time customers don’t care…”
Jo Major, CEO of Avanex at the Optical Fiber Conference… from LightReading
“We need to understand the crisis at the adopter level, or specifically how the new offering solves a problem such that the pain in moving to a new technology is far lower than the pain of staying in the status quo…”
Pip Coburn, Will Emerging Technologies Save Tech, 2003
“We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers, and copy those things as much as we can…”
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com, from Fast Company
“When you ask a simple question, you should expect a simple answer. Except when you’re dealing with a computer, that is, in which case all bets are off…”
Lee Gomes, WSJ
“You must design a product that is remarkable enough to attract the early adopters – but is flexible enough and attractive enough that those adopters will have an easy time spreading the idea to the rest of the curve...”.
Seth Godin, “Purple Cow”
HAL [after killing the entire hibernating crew] “Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over… I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you…”
2001: A Space Odyssey