om wisdom. Adolescence is a necessary stage of development, but the time has surely come to start acting a little more like a grown-up. Let's look at some of the immature behaviors we could live without.
"You're picking on me": Customers need information on the products they buy. Some companies are so troubled by the idea of customers getting information from someone not in their marketing department that they put up legal barriers to avoid product reviews.
Technology du jour: This industry is great at coming up with new technology but tends to lack something in focus and application. Need proof? Pen computing.
Product life cycles measured in weeks: Industry honchos point to collapsed life cycles with perverse pride, but when computer resellers complain that they can't learn a product'
s features before it goes out of production, things are definitely out of hand. So much for the symptoms.
What would maturity bring? What would we all get out of a more adult attitude? Here are some of the benefits.
A more mature relationship with the press: The computer press does a pretty good job of telling end users what new hardware and software does, but the fact is that writers want access to new products and technologies and will trade kid-gloves treatment to keep that access. Consumers, the press, and the manufacturers themselves would all benefit from insisting on more rigorous evaluations of technology and products.
Rational collaborations: Your reaction to a new industry consortium is probably a stifled yawn. Rampant egos, lingering paranoia about trade secrets, and disregard for what's best for the customer have made meaningful computer-industry consortia nearly impossible to create and sustain. Of course, differences drive improvements, but there are many areas--file formats
, anyone?--where reasonable agreement would be a godsend for users.
A customer focus: The industry needs to show enough maturity to care about what customers need. Too often, change in this industry is driven by what engineers and programmers want to build rather than what users need to have. Mature industries tend to respect the marketing people who talk to customers. In the computer industry, the technical types disdain them.
Getting the products right: Mature industries can produce mature products. With all the technological flash and sizzle of the latest generation of hardware and software, none of it is truly easy to use or solidly reliable. Here's a tip to vendors: Enduring system crashes is not a touching bonding ritual; it's a painful damper on market growth. Taking the time to get it right rather than rushing to the next project would be a sign of industry maturity welcomed by customers (and potential customers).
Mature businesses fearlessly solicit feedback from customers. Some
software companies claim their rigorous usability testing tells them what people like and don't like, and what they find easy or hard to use. But these usability tests are skewed. They're designed by insiders, by computer literates who have far more experience than most customers. Having product developers design and administer usability tests is like having Einstein put together a high-school physics exam.
The computer industry has convinced itself that its adolescent energy is a virtue. That was once true. But computers now do too many jobs for us. We can't have systems that crash without apparent reason, or software that talks back to us in that tone of voice so familiar to parents of adolescents. Product manufacturers and sellers need to care more about customer needs than developer whims. It's time to grow up--before you're grounded.
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Curtis Franklin Jr. is director of labs at Client/Server Labs in Atlanta, Georgia. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
cfranklin@cslinc.com
.
Oh, Grow Up
