The rate of technological development is accelerating, not only in the number of product categories that exist, but also in the number of products within each category. Arteculate’s staff are avid readers of tech blogs (it’s a requirement for all our writers – our own version of Matlab, for those of you who may have been rejected from engineering internships), and we know that a few years ago, a new line of laptops or a new digital camera was big news. Now those sorts of announcements are like background noise; they happen so frequently that almost nobody cares. They’re also drowned out by the dearth of new products in other product categories that didn’t exist a few years ago. So what we have now is so many individual product releases that it’s difficult to keep track of anything. Even if a product has some revolutionary aspects that used to prompt lengthy analysis, unless it has massive appeal (think about the iPad or the Kindle), it’s not going to have its day in the sun. Moreover, the products that get most of the attention are either in new product categories or those that undergo rapid change, so products that only see incremental improvement, like laptops, don’t get much mindshare.
Since our staff has difficulty keeping up with the latest technology, it must be a truly Herculean task for those people who aren’t technophiles to integrate these developments into their daily lives. In fact, the world is so flooded with technologies that people can take one of a few approaches. They can obsess over technology (we’re kind of familiar with that approach), they can pay attention to narrow categories of technology, they can vaguely pay attention to technology, or they can go the Luddite route and attempt to burn all new technologies to the ground (actually, we’d expect most Luddites to just be apathetic, but in case they wanted to remain historically accurate…).
What seems pretty clear, however, is that at some point, even the most gadget-minded among us is going to reach a point of overload. But it’s not that person who matters; if Joe Consumer has completely lost track of what new technology might improve his life, then it’s a sign that technological development is so rapidly outpacing people’s mindshare allocation as to be irrelevant. Perhaps electronics manufacturers, in their attempt to out-innovate their competition (and to play catch-up), have completely oversaturated the market with products. Even if the most informed .01% still pay attention to every new product and can differentiate one model from another, the glut of products might hurt the technology industry as a whole simply because most people won’t be able to wade through the choice sets within each category or among the categories. Simply put, too much choice can lead to poor purchasing decisions or just paralysis on the consumer’s part. Thus, inferior products might succeed over good products, or new, innovative products might never see the light of day. And if fewer people are buying shiny new toys, those of us who love them like our own children might not always be able to get what we want, either; this industry can’t run on our dollars alone.
But more than just lacking sufficient mindshare, there probably isn’t enough money to support accelerating product releases. While most people spend more on technology now than they did a decade ago, technology expenditures are only going to make up so much of people’s budgets, and they’re probably going to increase linearly from year to year if at all. Thus, if the rate of product releases is accelerating and the amount of money people plan to spend on technology isn’t, then a lot more products are going to fail today than ten years ago. That’s not to say there won’t still be products that are wildly successful; there will just be more failures for every success story.
To sum it all up, the pace of technological development is accelerating, most people’s mindshare and budget for technology has either reached its limit or at most grows linearly, and thus our favorite industry is going to have trouble reaching consumers who are positively overwhelmed with gadgets.