Focus Groups: Missing The Forest
The tech. blogosphere is awash with wailing and gnashing of teeth over the iPad. No built in camera. No support for Flash. No USB ports.
Obviously Steve Jobs and the people at Apple didn’t set up focus groups of technology-savvy geeks before designing the iPad.
I’d argue that when it comes to introducing great new technology, a focus group of any sort, let alone tech-savvy geeks, is probably the worst sort of tool you can use to determine what features to put in your product. There is an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. And for tech. products this is surely true.
The fact of the matter is consumers in general don’t always know what they want in a product. If someone had asked, back in 1983, what computer buyers wanted – very few, if any, would have said anything at all about a mouse, or a graphical user interface. And the ability, someday, to watch TV shows, listen to music, edit photographs, or connect wirelessly with a quarter of the world’s population was far beyond what 99% of people could even conceive of.
Why doesn’t the iPad have a camera, a USB port, or support for flash? Because it doesn’t need them. Some people think they might want them. But putting these “features” in the iPad would have made it cost more. Made it more susceptible to viruses or hacking. Burned up more battery power.
Technology and Media 
Please be quiet
Main Entry: 1ya·hoo
1 capitalized : a member of a race of brutes in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels who have the form and all the vices of humans
2 [influenced by 2yahoo] : a boorish, crass, or stupid person
— ya·hoo·ism \-ˌi-zəm\ noun
Yesterday, Apple announced the (long-awaited, almost mythological) iPad portable media device.
And was promptly greeted with an almost deafening cacophany of scorn and derision from the vast majority of online “commenters.”
Now, by “commenter” I do not speak of people who are actually paid to review technology products. The David Pogues and Jesus Diaz’s of the world. People with some actual writing skill and training. I’m talking about the vast army of unpaid cretins who think that the world is just dying to hear their particular take on a product they’ve never actually seen in person, nor laid a hand upon.
These geniuses tell us what an awful product the iPad is. It doesn’t have a camera. (It doesn’t have TWO cameras!) It doesn’t support flash. It doesn’t multitask. Its only going to be bought by those too dull-witted to be running Linux on their self-built $250 netbook. I see the word “sheeple” used a lot: As if anyone who buys an Apple product is so gullible that they can be gulled into buying whatever Steve Jobs and apple come up with.
To which I would say: Please, just shut up.
There are two sets of people with skill sets I’m interested in hearing from: People with the technical knowledge and resources to actually create things like the iPad. And people with the writing skills to objectively analyze and describe them. The vast majority of “commenters” on blogs, technology columns, websites, etc. simply use the space provided to them to pour out whatever ridiculous prejudices and agendas that happen to be floating around their empty heads.
The problem with virtually all online “comments” is that the people making the comments bear no responsibility for what they write. If David Pogue makes a wild, unsubstantiated claim that is later proven to be fundamentally wrong – then he will pay the price. His credibility, and hence his livliehood, will suffer. And as a result, he has a built-in incentive to be objective in his writing.
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