Aesthetics and eBooks
My colleague Moe Kelley makes an incredibly important point in his recent post about the importance of aesthetics.
Yesterday I was teaching the E Ink case study in my New Technology Ventures program at London Business School. It involved a fascinating and lively discussion, about what were the key parameters that characterized the available technologies, and re-emphasized just how important the aesthetic of books is.
I love books. I have a house full of books. My wife worries about the load on the ceilings. There are stacks of them in our bedroom. And in lots of other places in the house. I have a clinical Amazon.com habit, going back more than 10 years to 10 September 1999 (my sister’s birthday), during which I have bought hundreds of books.
Nevertheless, the class almost unanimously recognized and embraced the elegance of the industrial design of the Kindle DX that I used to demonstrate what E Ink does. It’s a different aesthetic, but compelling nonetheless.
Kindle DX
Although technology (hard factors) matter, even in high-tech we must never lose sight of the importance of soft factors, such as aesthetics.
One of the most interesting and insightful pieces of thesis work that I supervised at MIT involved a systematic exploration of the relationship between these hard factors (functions, performance) and soft factors (ease of use, aesthetics), and how their relative importance to customers evolves over the life cycle of a particular product type.
Getting this balance wrong the other way can, however, also be disastrous; much of Motorola’s current parlous position flows from it being seduced by the soft factors success of the RAZR:
Motorola RAZR V3
It provides the user with a total sensory experience – from the innovative metallic finishes and use of materials to a truly revolutionary, chemically etched keypad created from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy. The Motorola RAZR V3 is the ultimate, beautiful slim-phone.
Take time out to enjoy the feel, touch and finish of the model RAZR V3. The metal materials and finishes
create a smooth, easy-to-use phone that has real visual impact. The spun metal finish of the keypad is designed to gently reflect the light, whilst a blue electro-luminescence panel defines each character and key, creating an unmistakable RAZR V3 signature.
As a result, it lost sight of how technology was evolving, and was extremely late in responding to the transition to the app phone.
[...] Wednesday I taught the A123 Systems case (along with E Ink) to open my New Technology Ventures program at London Business School, and I illustrated this shift [...]