[…]Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage.
- The new XBox isn’t for hard core gamers.
- The new Flickr isn’t for professional photographers1.
- The most recent Final Cut isn’t for filmmakers.
To make pro tools into mass tools you need to take a step back. You need to prune features only used by a relatively smaller population of professionals. You need to ignore the cries from your most loyal customers and focus on the future. Only once you’ve built a beachhead of new mass users, casual users who are more numerous but pay less, you can start training these users towards the features you once cut. Or take advantage of the clean slate and head somewhere new, where you couldn’t previously go with only the pros for support.
Perhaps the most famous pro tool to mass tool shift was the iMac and OSX. Jobs and company ignored the cries from pro audio users who clung to OS 8 and 9 to keep latency down. The challenger brand was diluted and refocused by partnering with Microsoft and Thinking Different. The floppy drive, ABD ports, and expansion cards were pulled from the final product. Many who had clung to Apple through the 90s protested. But Apple kept their heads down, focused on new users, and grew towards the digital hub.
For products with saturated user bases the first step towards a brighter future is painful. It will be fun to watch how Yahoo, Apple, and Microsoft fair.
This article is ridiculous and hand-wringing. I’m linking to it for Mayer’s comments and to illustrate the fear of mass tools. ↩
I like that Drew recognizes that making mass tools is indeed the way toward a “brighter future.” I’m fascinated by the tension between power users and “the masses,” and how it reveals the complex relationship between power, freedom, and democratization.
Power users – or hackers – often frame their complaints about missing features in terms of freedom. When the iPad debuted, Alex Payne made this incredible statement:
The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.
Such tragedy boggles the mind.
As Drew has explained well, tools made for most people require focus and ease of use that usually fail to satisfy power users. The upshot of this is that more people have power to do more things, which diminishes the need for professionals. It’s a distribution of power and freedom from elites to the masses. It is, indeed, democratization.
[…]Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage.
Via Digital Photography Review:
- Clear Portrait -Silky Skin
- Backlit Softness
- Clear in Backlight
- Relaxing Tone
- Sweet Child’s Face
- Distinct Scenery
- Bright Blue Sky
- Romantic Sunset Glow
- Vivid Sunset Glow
- Glistening Water
- Clear Nightscape
- Cool Night Sky
- Warm Glowing Nightscape
- Artistic Nightscape
- Glittering Illuminations
- Clear Night Portrait
- Soft Image of a Flower
- Appetizing Food
- Cute Dessert
- Freeze Animal Motion
- Clear Sports Shot
- Monochrome
“Cute dessert.”
Jim Ray’s thoughts on Twitter’s music app include a good insight into how Twitter’s current approach encourages pollution of language, and, by extension, thought:
The #NowPlaying pane gets to the heart of what’s really wrong with the app and, may I suggest, Twitter circa 2013. In order for this 25% of the app to be useful, the people I trust and follow must also auto-tweet what they’re listening to, complete with hashtag detritus (or trolls). Perhaps I’m just too far past what Twitter considers cool, but a stream littered with #NowPlaying refuse (or Vines or Foursqure check-ins, for that matter) is a sign that I need to spend some quality time with the unfollow button. Twitter has built an app that requires users to abuse their timelines and followers with machine tags without any meaningful way of tuning out that noise.
One man’s noise is another man’s signal.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
I meant to capture something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I moved to the Bay Area in February: the tension between Silicon Valley’s impact on democracy and its utter lack of interest in or understanding of the institutions and systems of government its companies do business in. Silicon Valley isn’t on a bubble, it’s in a bubble.
Although she relies upon generalizations (which she acknowledges), Bracy makes some very good points here about the myopia of “Silicon Valley” and the bay area in general. Two quick thoughts:
Technology, despite a disappointing focus on widgets, continues to advance at an ever accelerating pace, while public policy lags. A few truly disruptive consumer-facing companies like Uber and Airbnb probably didn’t intend to push up against existing policy, but that’s ok. In fact, I prefer a model where a new technology creates consumer demand for new policies.
My point: you don’t have to set out to change public policy to positively impact it – technology’s rapid advance will continually bump up against our existing frameworks no matter what. By the way, Airbnb has a public policy blog.
We’ll move beyond Silicon Valley’s navel gaziness at some point. We’re still at the very early stages of the Internet. Still! We had a lot of fun a while back doing a project for World Bank HR in which we imagined what would happen when asphalt engineers or water sanitation engineers started blogging or using Twitter as a matter of course.
We’re still heavily skewed toward geeks building products that geeks use to do geeks stuff, but over time, the balance will tip more toward geeks building products that everyone uses to do everything. Generational shifts will change that.
Regarding products for everyone: I’m reminded that I saw a construction worker looking at his iPhone while holding up a stop/slow sign on the street the other day. Was he Instagramming about how authentic his job is? Remember: all the iPhones and Instagrams are the same.
Glancing at Rich Kids of Instagram, I’m reminded of Warhol’s quote about Coke:
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
All the iPhones and Instagrams are the same.
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
