Products that do too much

Forbes recently pub­lished an arti­cle by Jack Trout on some­thing I call “fea­ture creep”. There are many exam­ples of prod­ucts that are feature-packed but dif­fi­cult to use.

Trout spends a good chunk of his arti­cle dis­cussing smart­phones, includ­ing the Black­Berry. Smart­phones tend to excel in one area, while sac­ri­fic­ing per­for­mance in oth­ers. With­out men­tion­ing the term “key suc­cess fac­tor”, Trout does point out that smart­phones must be excel­lent, reli­able mobile phones – oth­er­wise, what’s the point of hav­ing a smartphone?

Of course, it is pos­si­ble to cob­ble together a smart­phone from exist­ing hard­ware and soft­ware. The Blue­tooth pro­to­col was cre­ated for just that pur­pose, after all. There’s a grow­ing num­ber of web-based ser­vices that will add fea­tures to data-capable mobile phones, too.

Tagged as: Bluetooth, hardware, key-success-factors, ksf, marketing, network, software, usability