mrplow
17-06-2003, 20:01
This really is a pretty good article, worth the (long-ish) read:
Technological accomplishment is often the product of a can-do rather than a why-do culture. That is why the recent TV ads for Orange phones suggesting that 80% of us are using only 10% of the facilities on our mobiles and need to be educated to do so are misplaced. Orange should be considering instead why 90% of the facilities on their phones are of no practical use to the vast majority of us.
The low take-up of 3G phones tells a similar story. The fact that so few of them have been sold in the UK two months after their delayed launch is not entirely about cost, since introductory prices have been slashed. It is also because it's not immediately clear what they're for, and that mystery is not sufficiently seductive to make many of us shell out.
(It's not all about phones btw)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,978873,00.html
Technological accomplishment is often the product of a can-do rather than a why-do culture. That is why the recent TV ads for Orange phones suggesting that 80% of us are using only 10% of the facilities on our mobiles and need to be educated to do so are misplaced. Orange should be considering instead why 90% of the facilities on their phones are of no practical use to the vast majority of us.
The low take-up of 3G phones tells a similar story. The fact that so few of them have been sold in the UK two months after their delayed launch is not entirely about cost, since introductory prices have been slashed. It is also because it's not immediately clear what they're for, and that mystery is not sufficiently seductive to make many of us shell out.
(It's not all about phones btw)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,978873,00.html