Using services to compensate for product weaknesses.
Via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/albinoflea/
What with things being the way they are, I have been thinking a bit more about services. Jeff Howard wrote a very good piece about service design today which you should read, saying that services are encapsulated arguments for how we should live our lives. It’s a poetic way of articulating a strong belief of mine that services are also messages for behaviour change.
However, another release today, also reminded me of a less lofty but just as useful benefit of services, extending the value of things or gaining business from existing customers.
As iPhone owners will tell you the camera is one of the weaker points. While people tell me it’s great for a phone camera, I think it’s actually quite embarrassingly bad and really not very Apple, but it’s a testament to how great the rest of the phone is that people don’t complain about it more.
A number of apps are coming to the rescue. Since being told about it by Christian, I’ve been a huge fan of Night Camera. This uses the accelerometer data to sense when your hand is still to take the best picture. Combined with the fact it lets you choose when to save a shot, it’s transformed my use of the camera night and day.
Today, Gizmodo posted about ClearCam, which unfortunately for me requires a jailbreak. The idea behind this is ingenious. ClearCam shoots 6 shots in quick succession and lets you stitch them together to create a 4MP photo instead of the standard 2MP. I could see this compensating somewhat for the lack of zoom in the camera. Enlarging a 4MP photo would still yield reasonable results, if anyone from Occitipal reads this, please release an App store version.
Again, these are fantastic examples of enhancing the experience of an existing device through services which generate revenue. Neither of these were complex from a technological standpoint, they simply required creativity to be brought to the solutions
I continue to be surprised by how few manufacturers are discussing this kind of strategy for their products. While small apps don’t generate the kind of excitement or sales that an entirely new iPhone would, I think apps like these definitely enhance the value the iPhone brings to me, they advance the iPhone platform, they increase my loyalty to the product and they are getting me (and others) to spend money.
Many of our major home appliances and devices (and cars) can be thought of a platforms for applications and services (not neccessarily digital ones). In this environment people are clearly unwilling to spend the money it takes to replace many of these items. Discounting new versions of these appliances and devices is also clearly not working. All this does is erode profit for manufacturers and decrease loyalty among customers. Surely it makes more sense to accept lower sales but greater profit through spending some portion of this money on improving the experience of existing products instead?
Am I missing something?