Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Your Cyber Servants
 
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More WS-* Questioning

Exceeding Customer Requirements: Bad for Business

ACM News Service: Surpassing Customers' Needs - When Technology is Too Good.  From 2004-09-25: This blurb makes a great contrast between early adopters and a developed market consisting predominately of late adopters "who crave reliable, simple, and affordable products" according to Don Norman.  There is also the point that products can be too good, with the price of excess quality being unacceptable to the target market.

Jeff Karoub's 2004-09-20 Small Times feature includes a great lesson that Hubert Kostal and NanoOpto Corp learned.  Kostal reminds us that "There is a tendency for startups to solve all problems with technology.”  The realities have the company now place plain-old business sense as the area of greatest effort, with technology maybe accounting for one-third of the business effort.

There's more from Don Norman too:

It doesn’t matter if your technology is superior, Norman argues; it only matters if what you offer is good enough for the purpose. And that’s tough for emerging fields fueled by science and research.

“Mainstream companies are not about technology, they’re about user benefits. Price is critical. Reliability is critical,” he said.

“The customer doesn’t care what technology they’re using. They care about getting their jobs done.” The customer’s always right.

posted by orcmid at 11/8/2004 09:45:25 PM