Each year, many companies release their latest revisions of hardware and software and attempt to convince people to spend their hard earned money for new items and upgrades. It's fairly easy to identify the times of year companies will release their latest and greatest items, often at times optimized for back to school or holiday purchases.
To illustrate the scheduling expertise, we can look at a company like Apple. For the past year, in June or July, they release a new version of their incredibly successful iPhone. The timing is perfect for adoption of both the general public as well as ideal for capitalizing on the fact that college students return to campuses in late summer. The same is also true of their iPod products. After the back to school buying season, they seed their latest iPod models. This almost ensures these models will sell like hotcakes during the holiday shopping season.
I see nothing wrong with how Apple and many successful companies determine their product release schedules. In fact, Apple has done incredibly well at using the typical annual buying trends of consumers to their advantage.
One thing that has always bothered me about technology companies is how they try to tell us what we want. In the case of Apple, run by the visionary CEO Steve Jobs, they demonstrate technologies that they claim will forever improve our lifestyles.
With the latest iPhone 4 release, looking back at the keynote announcement address, a significant amount of attention was given to the Facetime feature they included with the new phone. This feature allows you to have a real-time audio and video call with another contact in your contact list as long as they are using the new iPhone 4. Steve Jobs went on and on about how revolutionary it was to have the videoconferencing capability in your phone.
I have happily been an iPhone4 user for 4 months. Other than the one time I tried out Facetime with a friend shortly after purchasing the phone, I have never used it. The online community and technical pundits are illustrating the same. People have tried it once or twice, seen that it is neat to use, and have not touched it again. Certainly, there may be a small portion of iPhone 4 users that use the Facetime feature regularly, but I'm thinking most users simply don't find the feature that revolutionary.
My point is that each year companies toss out the one feature that they feel consumers will most want in their products. More often than not, users will never use the new functionality, but still buy into the hype the new feature offers in making their purchase decisions.
The same is true for operating systems and other software. Take Windows 7, each revision of the Mac OS X operating system, and Microsoft Office. Each year, new versions of these products are released with several if not hundreds of new revolutionary or must-have features. Companies sell boatloads of new software packages, but usability surveys show that an incredibly small percentage of users actually embrace these additions.
How do you feel about how technology products are marketed? Do you find that more often than not you do not use most of the new features each product revision offers? Do products deliver on their promises? Will you continue to drink the Kool Aid?
