Blog > A Home Run Doesn't Have to be Perfect
Some very lucky journalists with international reach have had the privilege to have a hands on review of the highly anticipated iPhone to be released this Friday the 29th in the U.S. For months now we've been treated to speculation, rumour, high praise and scorn for a device that very few had a chance to physically experience. Hands on reviews have finally started to come out and it appears that the iPhone is a home run but that it isn't perfect. Which is just as it should be.
Apple understands that you can have a hit but not be perfect. The iPhone is both revolutionary but also in a sense in its infancy. Both Walt Mossberg's review and David Pogue's review praise the phone for it's refreshing approach to a cellular phone and also point out its shortcomings.
When developing concepts with clients we often need to exercise restraint on our ambition to make the perfect product. Often the long list of features that a website "needs" will in the end hurt a product more than help it. Features, Time and Cost are the three factors which we trade off against each other when developing products. You can have more of one but at the loss of the other two. We typically draw a triangle for our clients where their product is a dot within it and the factors which they must trade off against are the three points within the triangle.
Jason Fried also refers to this concept as the The Product Triangle.
The iPhone for instance trades cost for features but trades features for time. Sure the iPhone could have done more in the first revision, but you probably wouldn't have seen it until 2008.
On any single version of a product you cannot achieve all three corners on the triangle. You can choose to emphasize one factor and it will in turn de-emphasize the other two. Conversely if you de-emphasize one factor it will emphasize the other two. For instance, if you wanted to build your own version of an iPhone by tomorrow, no matter how much money you had the number of features available would quickly approach zero.
Since I'm in Canada I'll have to wait for the deal between Rogers and Apple to shakeout and hopefully a slight reduction in price. By then I'm hoping Apple will be ready to hit another home run with a second revision.
Batter up!
Apple understands that you can have a hit but not be perfect. The iPhone is both revolutionary but also in a sense in its infancy. Both Walt Mossberg's review and David Pogue's review praise the phone for it's refreshing approach to a cellular phone and also point out its shortcomings.
When developing concepts with clients we often need to exercise restraint on our ambition to make the perfect product. Often the long list of features that a website "needs" will in the end hurt a product more than help it. Features, Time and Cost are the three factors which we trade off against each other when developing products. You can have more of one but at the loss of the other two. We typically draw a triangle for our clients where their product is a dot within it and the factors which they must trade off against are the three points within the triangle.
Jason Fried also refers to this concept as the The Product Triangle.
The iPhone for instance trades cost for features but trades features for time. Sure the iPhone could have done more in the first revision, but you probably wouldn't have seen it until 2008.
On any single version of a product you cannot achieve all three corners on the triangle. You can choose to emphasize one factor and it will in turn de-emphasize the other two. Conversely if you de-emphasize one factor it will emphasize the other two. For instance, if you wanted to build your own version of an iPhone by tomorrow, no matter how much money you had the number of features available would quickly approach zero.
Since I'm in Canada I'll have to wait for the deal between Rogers and Apple to shakeout and hopefully a slight reduction in price. By then I'm hoping Apple will be ready to hit another home run with a second revision.
Batter up!
Posted by Michael Glenn on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 02:20 PM in Design, Marketing with tags iphone, triangle • Permalink • 0 comments
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