I was just thinking to myself …one of the biggest success factors of twitter is it’s quality of being an IM tool minus courtesy to respond.
This led me to thinking: right, if twitter innovated out of IM (not replaced it) simply by taking that certain bit of inconvenience out of it, than could we apply this formula of
NEW GOOD PRODUCT = ALREADY GOOD PRODUCT minus that_little_troubling_bit.
At the end of the day, that’s the basic premise of re-innovating existing things. You either add new and new features (good if you’re Microsoft and release another more bloated version of Office 2011 and your customer base don’t care enough to bother switching) or you take something that’s already there, is quite popular and remove bits that people hate or would do without.
Following my line of thinking, you could say that…
- IM = email – not knowing if the recipient is available – all unnecessary fields (ie topic) – formal tone
- webmail = just email – having to respond at your computer
- last fm = itunes – having to own (be in possession of
any music files - googledocs = MsOffice – featuritis (software cellulitis) – having to work from the same computer
- podcast = radio – noise – push
As I look around myself, it’s fairly evident we have some candidates for a major product / functionality shake-ups, done in exactly this fashion. Look at these guys for example:
- calendar (minus what?…)
- browser (minus what?…)
- e-commerce site (minus what?…)
- price comparison engine (minus what?…)
- social network (minus what?…)
Filed under: (in English), UEX & UI, business & strategy
