High-Tech Product Design and Strategy

Let's get touchy-feely for a second, let's talk about emotions, feelings, and affection. Yes let's bring all those "soft topics" that seem to be superficial, peripheral, and irrelevant in technical and business atmospheres. Emotionally Attached. Sinclair ZX Spectrum. What did it happen to the Product Manager/Designer behind this blog? Did he go through an emotional breakdown? Is he considering a career change towards soul counseling? Did he forget about his technical background based on hard sciences? Too much TV talk shows? Not really, I am using exaggeration as vehicle to spark a somehow controversial discussion. When we talk about high-tech products we usually talk about electronics, software, engineering, business, and rational design; in such frame of thought, talking about emotional concerns seems too soft, too out of range, especially for my friends the engineers (which I happen to be one of them as well, or used to be, or I am st...

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...