BBC NEWS | Technology | Tapping into a digital future
Article which skirts around the issue (an old favourite of mine) concerning digital convergence and usability of digital products:
From a technology point of view, you can push innovation and people to pick up a digital lifestyle; but the other part of it is going to be a natural phenomena," said Adrian Criddle, country manager for Intel UK."What concerns me is that a lot of people who hear about digital music players don't understand that, at the moment, you actually need a PC to get the content."
Funnily enough a similar point was made today by Parks Associates (a research company who focus on this area, talking about Digital Media Adapters (devices that 'talk' to your PC via wireless Home networks):
"The industry assumes that if you want to listen to Internet radio on your stereo, you are an early adopter that already owns a Wi-Fi (wireless) home network," said John Barrett, the report's author and director of research for Parks Associates. "This is not the case. Right now there is not a single one-box solution on the market that meets the needs of the 71% of consumers who don't currently own a home network. Developing integrated, data-multimedia network solutions to meet this need will be very important."
Quite telling that at one report 'the industry assumes...' and from the other,
I think we have realised that ease of use and simplification is absolutely critical to take mass market adoption of new technologies."
You would think that they would have worked it out by now or perhaps technology or the product leads the companies rather than a proper marketing approach which would look at customers and find out what they want and how they want it?
Posted by Paul Goodison at November 5, 2004 10:09 AM | TrackBack