How We Will Make the Change
It won’t be easy, but this is the way
Posted Nov 13, 10:46 PM in business, environment, human nature, improvements, postmodernism
While I happen to agree with many of the socially progressive sentiments expressed by the American left, it’s time for the discourse to become more nuanced. Many on the left argue with no apparent compunction that businesses and businesspeople are problematic in themselves. These people, unfortunately, have bought into the sort of shallow extremist thinking that they are ostensibly accusing conservatives of.
Businesses are in fact neutral forces, and can do great things and can do awful things. A lot of it depends on what the public as a whole expects of them, and allows them to do. So say what you will about business, but also understand that every person who ever buys from any business is also playing a part in affecting social problems and influencing what happens in the business world. To blame all these social problems on businesses and corporate greed addresses only half of the problem. Consumers as a whole have not lived up to their end of the bargain in being more aware of how their own consumption habits enable or disable businesses to behave the way they do. And to dismiss business as a whole as being inherently evil precludes the idea that business can– and most likely will– be the strongest engine of change in this world one way or another.
But ultimately, the choice is really up to the people to choose what direction our society goes in, and what their role will be in promoting that. As it stands now, businesses are often punished by the market (AKA the people) for ‘doing the right thing.’ As a people, we must decide whether we want to correct that. So don’t blame business for being heartless; they do it because the markets demand it. And that’s all of our faults; we should not just hold businesses accountable, but also our governments, politicians, relatives, neighbors, friends, and more than anyone– ourselves.
It’s completely ridiculous to think that once we tear down our “big, bad business institutions,” we’re going to arrive at some kind of global consciousness. Equally ridiculous is the idea that business is an inherently evil pursuit and will fade away once we have achieved a certain stage of spiritual growth as a people. The fact of the matter is, for our society to make a leap of consciousness, we will need to actively choose it and reprogram our economic incentives system to better enable it to permeate our society. The impetus for that change has to come from within our society, not from some politician, bureaucrat, or businessperson.
At best it’s naive and counterproductive to go around blaming corporations and business for social injustices and the shortcomings of our society; at worst, it’s a harmful, divisive, and inflammatory attitude that dismisses the contributions that business can bring to the table.
Some might respond that my arguments here rely on “rational-choice” economics, in which consumers purchase based on perfect knowledge and conscious thought. Perhaps it is unrealistic— at this stage— to expect otherwise. But it seems quite clear to me that individuals should be responsible for their own actions, and aware of the repercussions of their actions. Far from irrelevant, moving beyond this self-imposed ignorance will be necessary to make the changes championed by the idealistic left. In fact, getting people to raise their own level of awareness is the one change that the world will truly need to move beyond where we are. We will need people– lots of people– to become aware of their impacts on the planet, and we need those people to take action. Finger-pointing and simplistic arguments against business aren’t the solutions. Personal change and sacrifice are.
Social Networking and Self-Regulation
the crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit
Posted Sep 28, 12:15 PM in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions
Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.
Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.
Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.
In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.
For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.
Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.
Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.
To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.
So much for that.
It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.
Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.
To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.
At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.
Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.
Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.
Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?
An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.
Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.
Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.
Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.
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How to Reduce the Complexities of Life to a Formula
and lose all meaning in the process
Posted Aug 25, 07:31 PM in economics, experiences, improvements
The following are some thoughts on an interesting discussion going on over here about “everyday utilitarianism.”
The idea described is that one could apply mathematical formulas involving marginal utility value and such to arrive at solutions for interpersonal problems of everyday life. In the given example, the author describes how you could use a formula he derived to determine whether you should be allowed to watch American Idol or whether your roommate should be allowed to use the television to play video games. By determining the utility value that each of you might receive from having your way, you can figure out what would be the solution that maximizes total enjoyment levels.
As dumb as it sounds, I have to admit that I’ve tried to use these sorts of formulas for real-world decision making in the past. For example, at a time when I was trying to choose between two job opportunities, I employed what I later discovered was a Pugh Matrix (AKA Quality Decision Matrix) to determine the optimal choice based on my own somewhat obscure sets of criteria and conflicting interests.
Sure, it gave me an answer, but in real life there are just too many factors to allow a major life decision to be made by a mathematical formula. For one thing, there simply is not room for all the possible inputs; you will miss important variables, and you’ll put in unimportant ones. You’re also likely to misjudge the marginal utility of all these inputs to you, and further, as Jonathan Haidt wrote in his excellent book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” we are often terrible judges of what our future selves would want. All this has a way of forcing you to second-guess the end answer that you’re given in a situation like this.
As humans, we’ve been thrown into this giant unpredictable chamber of life, and we desperately want to control it, optimize it, and best wrangle it to suit our needs. But we’re no good at it ourselves; no, there’s just too much variability for us to be accomplished at always making the right decisions. It’s for this reason that we look to things like computer dating websites, horoscopes, fortune tellers, and other such purveyors of “real answers” for assistance in making the “right” choices.
From our vantage point, we simply don’t have answers— but we desperately want them. The problem is that once we get the answers from these sources, we don’t typically have much confidence in them.
And why should we? When we are forced to make decisions, we typically have conflicting emotions, a battery of information that we need to make sense of, an understanding that we may be establishing some kind of precedent by our choice, and even the unsettling idea that our choices may be ones we have to live with down the road. Though for some it’s not as laborious as it is for others, serious decision-making is never easy.
So that brings us back to this website, where we are supposed to be using a utilitarian formula to arrive at the optimal quality of life situation for you and your roommate. It’s a great idea, to have a simple solution that would eliminate bickering and establish right-to-power heirarchies in a coherent, non-arbitrary fashion, but you’re not going to get it from this.
As I wrote in the discussion:
…[Unfortunately,] this methodology [requires] individuals to assess their enjoyment levels honestly, and with complete loyalty to the outcome as decided by the equation. In real life, we might expect persons to lie or misrepresent the level of enjoyment they claim they would get by having their way. In other words, this method assumes that individuals are committed to doing the ‘right thing’ as it applies to the goal of creating maximum enjoyment in the world, and having all participants enjoy the maximum enjoyment that they could receive in the long term. Realistically, I would tend to think that most people would try to maximize their own enjoyment instead of trying to maximize the pleasure of all, a motivation which subverts the ability for us to use a formula, since the formula depends on participants to act in a manner that does not necessarily secure their own interests before those of others.
As other voices chimed in, they brought in a number of other good points. Reader Mikey argued,
“How, exactly are you to measure how much utility you get from watching American Idol (at any time) versus how much utility he gets from playing videogames? …Intersubjective utility comparisons are epistemologically impossible.”
In other words, it’s not even possible in theory for you and your roommate to establish standardized values for your emotional responses to you each having your way. You might say that on a scale of 1-10, you want to watch your TV show, say, 7. Your roommate might want to play Halo 3 the same amount, but might give your his utility value an 8. It’s not possible to reconcile this because you can’t get into each others’ heads to do it.
He continues:
If there ever were some way to measure utility and your roommate actually was a utility monster [a person who derives much more pleasure from getting his way than you do], the proper utilitarian decision would look morally questionable (sacrificing all of your utility (and everyone else’s) for his proportionally greater benefit).
Another reader writes:
I find utilitarianism hard to defend. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the world would be a much happier place if you ate George Bush. Straight utilitarianism would tell you to go right ahead. Most people who subscribe to utilitarianism therefore have additional principles they throw into the mix when rating different actions, but once you start to do that, you lose what I always thought was the main selling point – a less-arbitrary way to rate actions.
Well, back to the old method: sleepless nights tossing and turning.
Sometimes More is Better; A Lot of the Time it's Just Confusing
We’re used to thinking that more is better, but from a marketing perspective, it’s often not
Posted Aug 13, 10:28 AM in business, improvements, marketing
My aunt’s house in small town Illinois has a large plasma screen, high definition television. They also have a state-of-the-art satellite dish, and a high fidelity sound system hooked up to said television. It’s all very impressive and cool— until you try to turn the thing on. At this point, it’s the most frustrating experience in the world, and you feel like Rip Van Winkle having needed another person do something as simple as turn on a television for you.
After all, it used to be that turning on a TV meant pressing a button. Now you have to turn on the TV with one remote, turn on the satellite receiver with another remote, and adjust the volume on a third remote. It’s all very complicated and annoying, but it’s a setup that I’ve seen repeatedly in many peoples’ houses. And it’s not just a matter of dealing with the inconvenience of having to press a button on a remote to get something working; it’s the utter, perplexing confusion of seeing 60 buttons on each remote and being unsure what to press and in what combination.
Behind the scenes, companies have labored hard to ensure that their devices are the most competitive and are loaded with the most features. But a side-effect of this strategy is that many high-tech products these days have what is called feature bloat. As functionality increases, the overhead necessary to carry it continue to get bigger and more demanding of your resources. In software such as the despised Windows Vista, this means that it’s taking up more and more of your hard drive space (now 15GB, up from 1.5GB for Windows XP!) and memory with functionality that you may never use, but which convey the idea that the product is ‘new and improved.’ In television products, this means that you have a series of individual components with specialized functions that each have their own massive remote control.
People say they want more features. And they probably do. But at some point, these additional features add only small incremental value to the product in the eyes of the consumer, while adding exponential overhead to their use. Your customer’s time, his/her computer’s resources, his/her very sanity are all being compromised further for every new feature that is being unnecessarily added. Steve Jobs understands this concept well. I read a book, Steve’s Brain, recently that talked about how his workers would labor for years on new features and when they presented them to him, he would just cut them out in a moment’s time, just saying that he didn’t like their affect on usability. This no doubt miffed the folks who had been toiling on these features, but ultimately, it was his sensible approach to feature addition that sustained the company despite being the heavy underdog in a fight with the Microsofts and the Dells of the world. What Jobs understood was that although features can impress people, they often made it more complicated to use the product, which in turn affects how people adopt the product, and how they transmit them to others.
The first generation of IPod apparently had hardware capability for listening to the radio, but Jobs demanded that they remove the radio’s accessibility from the IPod menu. It’s quite stunning to hear about, because we are so used to thinking that more is always better. But Jobs knew something that wasn’t obvious; more isn’t always better; more is often just confusing.
But, despite this, it’s not that simple. If you strip down your product, users will miss certain features. The problem is that they won’t all miss the same features. Mozilla got the idea right with their offer of add-ons, many of which are made by third parties. Good idea. Only get what you want, delete them if you no longer want them, and have fun searching around for stuff that might be useful.
You might think that this may only be possible with software, but it’s not true. You could easily have a system where your satellite receiver could download new features and you could apply them to unused buttons on the remote, or make them accessible through a special menu; or perhaps have a system in which the remote connects to your computer and can access additional feature downloads there.
The important thing to realize is that though new features seem like an automatically good thing, they are not. Adoption rates and satisfaction rates suffer when you make it hard for people to use your product, and it’s doubly bad when you piss them off.
Think of it this way: A little bit of chocolate is good; a lot of it will make you sick. Let your customer decide how much chocolate they want to eat at any given time, and try not to shove it down their throat! After all, too much at once means they might swear off chocolate for a long, long time.
Some Ideas for Cell Phone Companies
Let’s not embrace stagnancy
Posted Jul 18, 08:00 PM in business models, improvements, marketing, social networking
Sometimes I feel like cell phone companies have no idea what they’re doing. I’ve thought of any number of simple concepts that would make phones so much more useful. Here are some ideas:
1) You know the routine; you spend 5 minutes typing out a text message on your cell phone for an idea that it would take you 2 seconds to say. There are times I want to tell someone something, but I don’t want to talk to them or spend time texting it out. I want to be able to call someone’s phone and immediately reach their voicemail, but bypass causing the person’s phone to ring; instead, it should be a system that allows the caller the option of going directly to voice mail as opposed to allowing the phone owner to be in charge of that decision.
2) Allow me to use the GPS to find out whether my friends are physically near me. Update: I found out that a third party company is developing technology to do this.
3) Let me input information regarding my interests into my phone, and let me know if there are any people near me who share my interests. This could also potentially be used as a dating tool.
4) A memo function that allows you to quickly store to-do’s, reminders, ideas, and whatever else you may want to leave for yourself.
Those are just some thoughts. But given the competitive sphere of the cell phone market, why aren’t companies being more imaginative about their products? We’re talking about Fortune 500 corporations with billions of dollars in R&D money in an innovation-driven, high-tech industry that for reasons unexplained, cannot be bothered to push the boundaries!
Standing Out
Live up to your potential!
Posted Jul 12, 07:28 PM in business, business models, improvements, marketing
It always perplexes me as to why many manufacturers in saturated industries don’t take more efforts to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Take beer for example. Budweiser, Miller, and Coors have been fighting in the domestic beer market for ages, and despite the aggressive, multimedia advertising campaigns, the multi-million dollar Superbowl ads, and the painstaking and often pathetic efforts in making ‘sticky’ slogans, you’ve got products that many consumers still think are pretty much interchangeable (even if they have a brand preference). There are other beer brands too, like Sam Adams, Dogfish Head, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, etc. But oddly— except for White Stripe— they all come in bottles that look exactly the same. Sure, some are green and some are brown, and some are clear, but in terms of the bottle packaging, they’re pretty much the same.
If I were the maker of a brand that needed to build some equity, I would forgo the usual bottle and go with something that would generate interest in people who normally wouldn’t notice my beer. And I’d give them something that might make them buy my beer for a reason other than the beer itself!
I’d make my bottles blockish (perhaps the Jagermeister bottle might be a good model to imagine), and make them so they could interlock. That way people would feel inclined to keep them around the house and find uses for them, like propping things up, building shelves, making huge towers, using them as bookends, etc. The sort of things that college students might want to do.
This is only one example of what you could do. There are many cool things you could have instead of useless round beer bottles. How about a beer bottle in which glass can be easily punched out and be converted into a tobacco waterpipe? College students would love that. Maybe it could be something you could keep your change or pencils in. I haven’t invested a lot of time thinking about other potential ways to change package design because it’s not my job. But just think about how things might change if people wanted your product for more reasons than just the obvious one.
I think the people behind M&M Minis realized this when they started packaging their product in little plastic containers that would perfectly hold a roll of quarters (which many people, particularly young people, could use to hold their laundry money). I think the people in charge of Icebreakers, Altoids, Eclipse Mints, and Mentos Minis also realized this when they started producing useful, well-designed, and reusable containers for their candies. Sure, they are more expensive— a pack of Icebreaker Sours costs some $2.30, which is a lot for candy— but people want those containers.
Perhaps many companies out there might have products that might be able to take a lesson from these guys. Of course, there are logistical hurdles, but there are always logistical hurdles. Wouldn’t it be better to make your product different, to have people want it for many reasons, and have them looking at your products all day instead of just when they’re using it for its primary purpose?
Bicycles are in Desperate Need of (R)evolution
and why companies should make it easy for people to adopt their products
Posted Jun 24, 11:55 PM in business, business models, economics, environment, improvements, marketing, sustainability
Here’s the problem, as I’ve elucidated on a previous post: bicycle companies have not given the non-user a strong incentive to switch from cars to bicycles. Bikes, as they are currently sold, lack all the subtle (and not-so-subtle) features that new users who are wanting to instantly make their bike their primary mode of transportation will want; features like easy locking, built-in LED lighting, stylish and lightweight baskets, and chains that don’t eat your pants. These are all features that are immediately obvious to people who don’t bike regularly, or who have just started biking on a more frequent basis.
I’m certain that bicycle manufacturers will find any number of reasons to throw up resistance for these ideas, and deny that making such features standard is a good idea. This will make the bike heavy, they will say. It will make the bike less customizable. It will make the bike most costly.
Yes, these are all fine old-school reasons to not do something, argued from the standpoint of people who are so integrated into the semi-elitist, extreme-sports culture of hardcore biking that they fail to see the need for this evolution for the mainstream. To them, it’s an “it-ain’t-broke-so-don’t-fix-it” sort of argument; if someone wants a light, why not let them choose what kind to get— if they want one at all— instead of installing a standard one in the bike?
Here’s why.
Think about it from another vantage point; take the computer industry: What kind of computer do people who do not know anything about computers buy? They buy Macs. Why should they buy Macs? They are more expensive, have less software, are less prominent in computing society, and they pretty much force you to buy all your hardware from a single manufacturer whose products cost significantly more than comparable PC products. These facts, on paper, do not sound like things that are going in Apple’s favor at all.
But what Apple does offer is instant usability, assurance that everything is going to work, standardized components, integrated hardware that is compatible with the other pieces of hardware within it, and a single sleek and aesthetically-pleasing package that doesn’t need much modification or adjustment before you can use it.
Windows users are plagued with problems, often having to spend ages with their IT guys getting their network up and running, fooling with network adapter drivers, Windows networking software, and hardware conflicts— while Mac users simply input their IP numbers, and are smooth sailing. Meanwhile, the Windows user is pulling his hair out.
This is an instructive analogy. Think about it. Make it easy for someone to adopt your product. Isn’t that obvious?
People just getting on the bicycle bandwagon don’t want to deal with taking their LEDs on and off every time they get on a bike. They don’t want to deal with their clothes getting ruined by a chain that apparently can’t be made to not destroy clothing. They don’t want to be condemned to carrying everything they brought with them everywhere they go just because the bike has no close-able, lockable basket. They don’t want to deal with their bikes being space hogs in their homes because the handlebars don’t fold. They don’t want to buy dozens of aftermarket components and install them all on a machine they don’t understand, hoping that they got the right ones and that they fit with their type of bicycle and frame size. They don’t want to have a Frankensteined bicycle bearing so many different companies’ products that their bikes look like they were cobbled together from scrap.
They want all that stuff taken care of beforehand because they don’t want to think about that! They just want to be able to ride with confidence, have all the accessories they may want right there (and have them easy to put on because they were designed specifically for the bike they bought), and they want to get on with their lives. They don’t want to tinker with a machine whose secrets are only privy to the technicians who sold them the bike. They just want to ride!
A smart bicycle manufacturer would recognize this immediately and build a modular, Mac-inspired bike that includes everything that someone who instantly wants the bicycle to be their main form of transport would want, and fixes all the dumb oversights that discourage them from adopting this technology right now. Yes, it will likely raise the price of the bike, but for many people, not wanting to deal with frustrations and being nickeled and dimed on accessories is more valuable than having a cheaper bike.
A bike like this could easy generate a great deal of brand cachet, high sales, and could earn a company an army of lifelong customers and bicycle enthusiasts. Seems like a great investment to me. So what’s the problem?
Status Quo, Bicycles, and Innovation in Products that Matter!
Posted Jun 10, 11:29 AM in business, business models, economics, environment, experiences, improvements, marketing, sustainability
Status quo is there for a reason. People don’t like to change what they’re doing, and will find self-justifications for why they shouldn’t. This is true in many contexts; many of us have witnessed this in interactions at work, politics, and other social spheres. If someone is being forced by outside conditions to make a change in their consumption behavior or to purchase items that they weren’t planning on buying, they typically aren’t happy about it, and will find reasons to avoid doing it. That’s why companies that make high-involvement consumer products should really be proactive about finding ways to understand and address the dissatisfactions that consumers have about their products so that they can convert hesitating customers into excited, eager customers.
Case in point:
I was picking up my treasured Cannondale bicycle from Revolution Bike and Bean, a cool bike repair shop in Bloomington, Indiana, and was talking with the owners about bike sales. Brad, the owner, was commenting that sales had risen considerably over the past year. I remarked that they would probably be even better if bike manufacturers had spent more time examining how people who don’t regularly ride bikes respond to them when they first get on, and understand why many people who bought them stopped using them.
I’m a hardcore bike junkie, and even I have a huge list of complaints about bikes that are in need of being addressed. These aren’t things that will affect whether or not I actually use my bike, and may not affect the frequency either—but this is only because I have already adopted it as my primary form of transportation. For those who haven’t these are reasons why they may choose not to:
- Sometimes it is hard and time-consuming to lock the bike. How about a keyed lock system that prevents the wheels from moving? It may not prevent theft completely (someone could take the whole bike), but it could serve as a quick locking system in situations where there isn’t anything to lock the bike to, or when you only need to lock it up for a short amount of time.
- Bike are not well equipped to hold things/carry groceries. This is a major deficiency. If you want to make bicycles a viable primary form of transport for a mass audience, it needs to be able to handle the needs of a typical car owner. Almost everyone uses a car to get groceries. Make the bike a serviceable grocery carrying device, and you’ve given them one less reason to drive.
- The bike chain can get grease everywhere, especially on pants. Chain guards are for some reason disfavored by bike manufacturers, and they only put them on their lower end bikes. If you want a chain guard, you can’t even have one added because of the way the bikes are designed. Yeesh, we can put a man on the moon but can’t add a chain guard to a bike that didn’t have one when you bought it.
- Pants and clothing can easily get caught in the chain. Not only does this ruin clothes, but it is dangerous, as you can be suddenly pulled by the chain off your bike if you aren’t paying attention. The only solution is to A) buy a bike with a chain guard—one cannot be added later!; B) roll up your pants C) wear shorts, or D) wear a Velcro pant holder strap. All of these options are subpar. The bike should be re-designed to either move the chain out of the way of clothing, have it housed in an isolated unit, or at the very least have the capability of having a guard added
- Handlebars should fold for easier and more compact storage. Having two bikes takes up an inordinate amount of space, especially if you don’t have a garage. Simply having folding handlebars would allow one to take up half the space it did before.
- Bikes don’t have a built-in LED light source that can’t be stolen (required voltage for an LED light is so low that it might even be able to be dynamically powered, which is great because the old dynamos they had in bikes a few decades ago were pathetic and slowed you down big time). This would encourage people to ride even when it’s dark outside, and without having to carry their lights around by hand once they park their bike.
- There’s no way to avoid getting wet during rain; this is a serious problems for bicycle commuters, and they have no way to get to school or work if they don’t have a car or mass transit options. This might sound silly, but surely it is possible to have a full plastic enclosure that can be propped up on the bicycle, and would keep the rider either completely or mostly dry. I believe in some parts of Asia, there are bicycle umbrella holders, but these are probably not that useful, given that the wind is often blowing, which makes rain go all over the place and would probably invert the umbrella too. I’m thinking more of a big see-through rectangular plastic box that goes over the entire bicycle and rider.
And then there are these problems that may be impossible to solve:
- When there is water on road, mud gets on your clothes from water being thrown off the tires. You can buy mudguards, but they don’t stop all the water.
- There is no area on the bike to store possessions when leaving your bike parked for a while (the same way you might leave your things in the car when you go somewhere else).
- No convenient place on bike for lock storage. This is partially the fault of lock manufacturers. Their lock holder designs are so horrible, illogical, and impractical that they are basically useless.
- It’s too easy to steal the wheels. You can switch out a standard quick-release lock with one that requires an allen wrench (AKA hex wrench), but it’s still not that hard.
- Geared bikes are a bit too hard for novices or casual bikers to maintain by themselves without getting into somewhat complicated and technical areas requiring a panoply of specialized tools.
- Bikes are heavy and unwieldy. Many of the above suggestions would make them even heavier, unfortunately. Newer designs should employ strong but light materials, perhaps like plastics or bamboo.
- Safety helmets are big, annoying, and hot. Is there any hope?
Bicycles are one of the most efficient forms of transport given the energy crisis and the increasing instances of obesity in our society, it is important for us as a society to encourage the use of bicycles (see this article on how obesity contributes heavily to global warming). To do so we must address the reasons why people do not use them, and encourage bicycle manufacturers to address these issues in their next generation vehicles. It’s in their own best interest after all.
UPDATE: I’ve continued my thoughts on the need for change in the bicycle industry on this post.
