It’s amazing how many companies you come across these days who attempt to define their own products and company goals within the context of Apple’s products. Not bad for a company that only a decade ago was seen by many as the Little Engine That Could.
Be it “out-iPhoning the iPhone” or “out-AppStoring the App Store”, people are so pre-occupied with what the turtlenecked one is up to rather than getting their own houses in order, so to speak.
Kontra (a somewhat mysterious moniker), over at counternotions, does an incredible job framing this very issue in a different way with a post titled Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”. It’s so chock full of valuable info that I recommend you read it all but you just can’t spare the time, check out these great nuggets of product development deliciousness:
These first quotes remind me of a tense Dennis and I used to refer to as “Future Perfect” while we were in Grad School. The total emphasis on vision completely undercuts the tangible value of execution. For us, it was infinitely more rewarding to build something and get it in front of users, with its imperfections, rather than design and talk about something that no one would ever get to touch.
Why bother?
It’s quite easy and fun to dig up “concept products” that really have no hope of turning into real, shipping products. Why then do commercial entities bother to produce them often at great expense?
Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.
Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products
Pretenders don’t quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design — hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.
It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple’s case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.
Being truly innovative requires making products that can fundamentally change people’s behavior while reshaping industries. Releasing products that can do that are, by nature, huge risks. On the other hand, how can you expect to truly change people’s lives with vaporware?
Product design, above all, is a bet. Apple understands this better than any other company. In iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn’t decline, I explained just what a huge bet the iPhone project was to Apple in 2005. It was a bet-the-company kind of bet. One that Nokia, which has sold hundreds of millions of phones over many years, never took. Neither did Microsoft. They would just as well release annual concept products to the public in order not to go through the pain of taking a bet.
Apple bet the company to single handedly change the industrial design of mobile devices, how we interact with them, the balance between carriers and manufacturers, mobile application vending, etc. Indeed, it simply redefined what a mobile device is to become. Apple did this not with a concept product, but by betting its own billions on a shipping product. This, of course, is nothing new to the company that also gave us Apple II, Macintosh, iMac and iPod…all without concept products.
And finally, they do a great job of summing up the only reason that would make sense for a company to release concept products:
Commercial entities have no advantage in releasing concept products the likes of which they hope to subsequently sell. If the conceptual piece truthfully captures their “best” it can only tell their competitors how advanced they are and where they fall short. If it camouflages their true capabilities in an effort to mislead their competitors, then what value is it to others? In fact, the intention to mislead competitors is really the only effective reason for a commercial entity to publicly release concept products.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, this inexorably leads us to Kontra’s law:
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.
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