High-Tech Product Design and Strategy

The fast pace of technical innovation fueled by the aggressive competition that drives today's markets makes product and services to become obsolete very quick. At this point is not big news that the lifespan of products is much shorter than a few decades ago. What is not as evident are the multiple reasons that make products die young. Not just a move, a game strategy. Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.Net Obviously technical innovation is a key factor for fast path to product obsolescence; for instance, my current smart phone is fairly new, it was one of the most advanced models at the time i bought it (only a few months ago); despite of having a great embedded camera, it does not have a second front-facing camera (front-facing cameras started to show up in phones days after I got my phone). Mobile video conversations are becoming a common practice, soon the pressure of my relatives and friends will make me feel alienated or be called "dinosaur" if I do not video-chat

The Journey. Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.Net In the early days of the software industry, people used to talk about programs and not about products, software solutions used to be simply -built- versus being -designed-. Like in many other disciplines, applied computer science started small, by people writing modest programs that took advantage of those increasingly accessible things called computers. Programming has evolved organically solving less "scientific" problems, people gradually started talking about "applications" and simple business programs rapidly evolved into sophisticated systems. But only when those systems started to be implemented as repeatable solutions for third parties was when the real industrialization of software started, and when the software as a -product- was born. A similar phenomenon has taken place in the field of electronics with the massification of integrated circuits and microprocessors, in fact, after the explosion of electron