Monday, June 18, 2007
Boundaries to "Mash-ups" going mainstream
At the risk of writing yet another pessimistic anti-technology polemic, here is a post I created at the Innovation Journalism Conference at Stanford a few weeks ago.
My primary reaction to the Innovation Journalism Conference is: the idea that humans can overcome insurmountable obstacles using merely ideas is both laudable and debatable. I would agree that innovations can cause dramatic positive impact. Yet, harnessing the power of innovations was a subject not addressed in a fashion I would consider reasonable or logical. Rather, innovations were treated as inherently beneficial to all populations, a view I’d consider slightly too rosy in light of the variety of unexpected failures and triumphs of technologies.
One specific reaction I had was in response to Stefan Andreasen, CEO of Kapow Technologies, Inc. On Monday he gave a compelling presentation at the Innovation Journalism conference in Stanford. This post responds to his assertion that he did not see obstacles to “mash-up” technologies going mainstream and becoming profitable. As such, my response is a friendly polemic. I will here present several obstacles I see to online “mash-ups” making a jump to mainstream usage. Specifically, the obstacles to mash-up technologies are social, technical, or economic, or a blend of two or more of these categories.
On a social level, people may simply not find mash-up technologies usable. Or in other words, is a mash-up of two technologies always more useful than separately? Or might there be instances where there combinations are less useful? Stefan pointed out current data (provided by Mackenzie) suggesting that time between task is an issue with the current range of activities we perform. A carefully crafted “mash-up” may indeed reduce time between task. But we do not live an isolated environment. People make daily decisions based on many factors, not just to become more efficient. There may very well be social and cultural reasons for the decisions we make in everyday activities that are even larger obstacles than benefit.
One of the primary lessons Rogers’ ideas of innovation adoption showed was that relative benefit is not a powerful enough force to ensure success. History is littered with examples of technologies that failed despite seemingly overwhelming benefit, or succeeded despite being inferior: the introduction of guns to Japan largely failed and were only revived when Perry opened the country to the west, the QWERTY style keyboard remains only because a now-defunct benefit (it deliberately made people type slower as to not jam typewriters), and Betamax failed despite better picture quality. The latter technology, home videocassette, is a good case in point. It succeeded because of a number of factors, not the least of which is it was picked up by the adult film industry (a battle currently being re-played with blue-ray and HD-DVD). VHS was inexpensive, but the industry was also slow to realize that people would be willing to sacrifice cinematic experience for a cheaper video deck and media.
I have also found few truly parsimonious “mash-ups,” and even fewer that have a clearly understood metaphor guiding their use. For instance, my mother-in-law finds her FM radio easy to use and uses it daily when going on walks. Despite being given an iPod for free, she continued to use her FM radio. She didn’t feel a need to learn another piece of software just to have different music on her walks, and the iPod didn’t yet have the shows she listened to. It was too complex for her needs. Similarly, I feel that mash-ups are frequently too complicated or do not fulfill a need in a way a person can easily understand.
Economic barriers to wide adoption of “mash-ups” exist in business, which are related to the inability for the Internet to adapt to different technological models. Open APIs require the willingness of business and also ample bandwidth and servers. The need for increased transparency and openness in the business world has been demonstrated politically, but many businesses may still not be enthusiastic about opening up their bandwidth and servers, and consequently time and money, for what is essentially un-regulated ad-hoc usage.
The revenue stream for and profitability of “mash-ups” are unclear. If an advertising model cannot be used with the technology, and it fails to drive business, companies may realize they are delivering content at a high cost to a very small demographic. Is it even possible for “mash-ups” to become mainstream in the same way as other technologies, such as television? I do not question the ability for individuals to process great amounts of information, for people have shown impressive abilities to encounter and deal with large amounts of data. Claims of Internet "addiction" aside, there has been little to no data showing that the average person is subject to “information overload.” That a minority of individuals has an interest in new technologies is not surprising, but many of the obstacles to mash-ups going mainstream lie elsewhere.
My primary reaction to the Innovation Journalism Conference is: the idea that humans can overcome insurmountable obstacles using merely ideas is both laudable and debatable. I would agree that innovations can cause dramatic positive impact. Yet, harnessing the power of innovations was a subject not addressed in a fashion I would consider reasonable or logical. Rather, innovations were treated as inherently beneficial to all populations, a view I’d consider slightly too rosy in light of the variety of unexpected failures and triumphs of technologies.
One specific reaction I had was in response to Stefan Andreasen, CEO of Kapow Technologies, Inc. On Monday he gave a compelling presentation at the Innovation Journalism conference in Stanford. This post responds to his assertion that he did not see obstacles to “mash-up” technologies going mainstream and becoming profitable. As such, my response is a friendly polemic. I will here present several obstacles I see to online “mash-ups” making a jump to mainstream usage. Specifically, the obstacles to mash-up technologies are social, technical, or economic, or a blend of two or more of these categories.
On a social level, people may simply not find mash-up technologies usable. Or in other words, is a mash-up of two technologies always more useful than separately? Or might there be instances where there combinations are less useful? Stefan pointed out current data (provided by Mackenzie) suggesting that time between task is an issue with the current range of activities we perform. A carefully crafted “mash-up” may indeed reduce time between task. But we do not live an isolated environment. People make daily decisions based on many factors, not just to become more efficient. There may very well be social and cultural reasons for the decisions we make in everyday activities that are even larger obstacles than benefit.
One of the primary lessons Rogers’ ideas of innovation adoption showed was that relative benefit is not a powerful enough force to ensure success. History is littered with examples of technologies that failed despite seemingly overwhelming benefit, or succeeded despite being inferior: the introduction of guns to Japan largely failed and were only revived when Perry opened the country to the west, the QWERTY style keyboard remains only because a now-defunct benefit (it deliberately made people type slower as to not jam typewriters), and Betamax failed despite better picture quality. The latter technology, home videocassette, is a good case in point. It succeeded because of a number of factors, not the least of which is it was picked up by the adult film industry (a battle currently being re-played with blue-ray and HD-DVD). VHS was inexpensive, but the industry was also slow to realize that people would be willing to sacrifice cinematic experience for a cheaper video deck and media.
I have also found few truly parsimonious “mash-ups,” and even fewer that have a clearly understood metaphor guiding their use. For instance, my mother-in-law finds her FM radio easy to use and uses it daily when going on walks. Despite being given an iPod for free, she continued to use her FM radio. She didn’t feel a need to learn another piece of software just to have different music on her walks, and the iPod didn’t yet have the shows she listened to. It was too complex for her needs. Similarly, I feel that mash-ups are frequently too complicated or do not fulfill a need in a way a person can easily understand.
Economic barriers to wide adoption of “mash-ups” exist in business, which are related to the inability for the Internet to adapt to different technological models. Open APIs require the willingness of business and also ample bandwidth and servers. The need for increased transparency and openness in the business world has been demonstrated politically, but many businesses may still not be enthusiastic about opening up their bandwidth and servers, and consequently time and money, for what is essentially un-regulated ad-hoc usage.
The revenue stream for and profitability of “mash-ups” are unclear. If an advertising model cannot be used with the technology, and it fails to drive business, companies may realize they are delivering content at a high cost to a very small demographic. Is it even possible for “mash-ups” to become mainstream in the same way as other technologies, such as television? I do not question the ability for individuals to process great amounts of information, for people have shown impressive abilities to encounter and deal with large amounts of data. Claims of Internet "addiction" aside, there has been little to no data showing that the average person is subject to “information overload.” That a minority of individuals has an interest in new technologies is not surprising, but many of the obstacles to mash-ups going mainstream lie elsewhere.
Labels: mash-ups web 2.0 public API blogs RSS google
