The role of product launches.
I’m back and pretty swamped at the moment which is why I haven’t written for a while, but I thought I’d take a quick break to say happy new year and share one quick thought.
This time of year (I’m talking CES and Macworld) always sees vendor after vendor trotting out their newest products in press release after press release.
The thinking, I’d guess, is that this is a chance to demonstrate how innovative and successful we are by showing that we can deliver a huge depth and breadth of new products to satisfy every single conceivable market.
Perhaps it has to do with how I now receive this news (via RSS), but to me the impact is exactly the opposite. Announcing acres of new products feels like an attempt to make news out of vanishingly small differences between SKUs.
Two companies in particular have stuck out to me this year:
This is a selection of HP’s product announcements:
And a selection of announcements from Garmin
These thinly veiled attempts to garner more attention and press aren’t lost among the blogging community. In fact Gizmodo, talking about an announcement from Goodyear, says:
“The company has pulled a Garmin on us, brand spamming with an entire product line of eight different GPS units that’ll roll out at CES, and ship in Q2 of this year.”
This contrasts sharply with how Apple treats their new product launches. In fact, I’d argue that Apple doesn’t ever launch products. They launch categories and then they announce “refreshes” to categories. This enables them to tell a much bigger story around far fewer developments. It also helps to further solidify my understanding of the Apple brand, as a maverick that both creates categories or transforms existing ones.
Doubtless there’s a ton of great engineering and thinking hidden behind the HP and Garmin announcements, but the way they are pushed out obscures and cheapens all of it.