Technology as a service?
Problems are constant, solutions change with time.
The most important problems have generally been constant, and technologies that arose to solve the problems have become popular immediately. The problems mentioned are not problems tackled by academia in general, but those that are faced by people in general. One example is a smart thermostat.
I always had a problem. I wanted the house warm and comfortable when I was home, but I wanted to save power when I wasn’t. Since my presence at home was unpredictable, it was hard for me to program my thermostat. The simple requirement I had for a thermostat was that I can switch it on 30 minutes before I came home. All other features are “nice to have“ but not the core requirement.
Nest thermostat became popular because it solved this problem for people like me. However, the focus was diverted to unimportant issues after its success. It looked like the people wanted to solve for other problems like “Can I see the temperature from across the room?“, “Can I control it with my voice?“ etc, which were diverting the products away from the core issue.
Jobs to be done
At that time, I understood that something was annoying me. However, I got clarity when I watched the milkshake video from Prof. Clayton Christensen. In case you did not watch it, It talks about “jobs to be done“ approach where every product has a job for the customer. I will take another example to explain this below (Perhaps not as eloquent as Prof. Clayton Christensen).
When I was working, one day I went to the coffee room / office kitchen with my colleague. As we were talking, he took a packet of roasted coffee seeds and started grinding them with a hand grinder (his personal one which was stored in a shelf in the kitchen). He then took a machine similar to the golden one shown below and did a lot of interesting steps in progression and made his espresso. He asked me if I wanted one, I declined, as I had just purchased some hot chocolate from the vending machine.
I was fascinated by the whole process that I had to go research about it on the internet. I then purchased relatively cheaper equivalents online, got some coffee seeds from the local supermarket. I opened the packages on Saturday morning and started making (brewing) by coffee. My wife who had just woken up, came to the kitchen as was pretty shocked, perhaps because she has never seen me drinking coffee and because we have a nespresso machine at home exclusively used by her.
The coffee that came from the manual machine depended on my skills, while a nespresso or an expensive automated machine were proven to provide a similar experience every time. I did not actually care about the coffee, but I was attracted towards the process. It provided me a satisfaction that automated machines did not provide.
Who are the competitors for this manual process which includes hand grinder, manual espresso maker and probably a french press for making foamed milk. It is not the automated machines. From my perspective, the competitors are vinyl record players, diy audio equipment, Marklin’s model train sets, DSLR camera, I can go on.. Perhaps 20 years back, the job would have been defined as something else. Today I would define the job for the above list of items as “keeping me away from the computer/ smart phone/ tv and making me forget about other problems.“ Oh you are just redefining the word hobbies, you say. However I consider them not as hobbies themselves, perhaps as enabler for hobbies. An interest in good cameras might make me more interested in photography.
For me, the manual coffee making set(?) wins over the other competitors because
It is cheaper.
My kid cannot reach the coffee maker yet, unlike the train set which has to be protected from him.
Provides repeated entertainment. ( Which coffee beans should I try this time? , What happens if i roast my own beans?, How does it compare to a Bailey pot? etc.)
Once the job is clearly understood, its easy to see why some of the items on the list above have unreasonably expensive products. They are selling an experience, not a product.
AWESOME and COOL Technologies
There are lot of awesome and cool technologies which makes many engineers/ technophiles drool. Some examples would be AI, flying cars, transparent screens with gesture recognition, machine learning (esp. deep learning), cryptocurrencies, IOT etc.
The problem with these technologies is that they become more important than the job to be done. Instead of using them as useful tools which can be used when need arises, they become the star. A hammer in search of nails ( Sometimes also leads to using a hammer to drive screws instead of a screwdriver, as hammer is the current buzzword).
I myself fell into this trap more than once. So our team was able to do gesture recognition with kinect and wanted to find an application for it. We started working on a smart recipe reader which uses gesture recognition. The reasoning was simple, your hands are dirty/ oily (to operate a touchscreen or laptop) while cooking, you can move through a recipe with different gestures without touching the screen. Turns out that a youtube video solves the problem better. If someone wanted to listen to a part again, they can just clean their hands and move it to the right position. They expensive hardware required for the improvement did not make things easy.
There are always exceptions though. Deepl has done a very good job of creating a language translator with deep learning ( I guess). In most cases though, the jobs to be done approach always leads to better products. This can be easily found with few examples.
Let us take a look at some technology companies who use this approach (delibrately or inadvertently). The first one that comes to mind is Apple, where the focus is clearly on “jobs to be done”. IPad stands out to me personally because I had no idea why I would need a bigger phone. There was a lot of criticism before its release and its success was initially delegated to hardcore apple fans and Jobs halo effect.
As a student, watching movies, browsing the internet, reading ebooks on a carefully positioned laptop while lying down was common during that time. This had a lot of disadvantages, like taking care of the position of the power supply, not burning your skin etc. The Ipad solved all these problems. I have never used my laptop for consumption after I got my Ipad.
Even after the release of the new versions of Ipads, there was criticism about the focus on the thinness/ reducing the weight of Ipads. Well, the heavier Ipads led to wrist pains if you were using it a lot. So the focus was always of the most important problem to the consumer, even if the consumer did not realize it.
Another example that is popular is the introduction of Dropbox.
Overtime it was clear that Dropbox did its job much better than any other method or combination of methods.
A lot of other examples can also be discussed, however I hope I made the point. As long as the job to be done is clear, the company/ product can optimize for the right parameters. If the clarity is lost, we can easily recognize it when we start hearing complaints about “bloat“.
Cool technologies without a clear job description will usually become short lived fads. Kinect was the highest selling Microsoft product in history. Its not in the market for consumers anymore.