The Shape of Things to Consume

The Shape of Things to Consume Delivering Information Technology into the Home ALAN CAWSON University of Sussex LESLIE HADDON University of Sussex IAN MILES PREST, University of Manchester Originally published by Avebury in 1995 ISBN 1 85972 052 8 This text is copyright © A. Cawson, L. Haddon and I. Miles 1995 It may be copied or downloaded for personal use, but not sold. Contents Preface The Shape of Things to Consume Delivering Information Technology into the Home Preface Chapter 1 Technological innovation and consumer products Chapter 2 Consumer products and markets Chapter 3 Home automation Chapter 4 Home electronic messaging Chapter 5 Interactive compact disc-based multimedia Chapter 6 The innovation process in consumer IT products Chapter 7 Conclusion Preface The impression is often conveyed in popular writing about electronics and the ‘information revolution’ that the pace of change is break-neck, and that a torrent of innovations is about to swamp us and force us to change the way we go about our daily lives. Many journalists writing about this technology, for example, become excited by its potential, and assume that because something is technically possible, it will — almost inevitably — happen. The same excitement can affect company management, and lead to speculative deal-making in anticipation of rapid changes in markets. What can happen later, however, is that newspapers find another set of issues, and that, after an initial flurry of excitement, in which firms seek to ‘position’ themselves in relation to the expected direction of change, it often happens that more realistic views come to the surface, proposed mergers are called off, and expectations of rapidly developing markets are scaled down. This seems to be exactly what has happened in 1993-4 with the writing about ‘convergence’ and the development of ‘information superhighways.’ The efforts of US vice-president Al Gore to publicise the opportunities for economic growth afforded by information technology (IT) coincided with some important technological advances, notably in the area of digital compression technologies and telecommunications switching. Suddenly major deals were being announced between telecoms companies and cable TV operators in the US, the European Union was setting up an expert committee (the Bangemann Committee) to ensure that Europe was not left behind, and Japanese policy-makers were reportedly worried that the Americans had leap-frogged their previous advances in IT. But how does anyone know that these new markets will develop so quickly? What evidence lies behind the view that consumers will be queuing up to get onto the information superhighway? Will ‘multimedia’ remain as what John Sculley of Apple once called a ‘zero-billion-dollar’ industry, or will it reach the dizzy forecasts produced by the IT consultants? This book examines in detail, for three new consumer IT product areas, how the producers of technology developed their ideas about consumer preferences, and how this knowledge shaped the design process of the products. We show, in the case of Prestel, for example, how an earlier outbreak of ‘techno-optimism’ led to the view that large numbers of consumers would begin to get their information from computers via the television screen. Exactly the same arguments heard now about the information superhighway were being made, albeit in more measured language, about the potential of this earlier generation of computer technology. The technology has improved considerably in this twenty year period since Prestel was invented, but how far have consumers changed? We look at the early assumption of the designers of Compact Disc- Interactive (CD-i) that many people will want to ‘interact’ with their television set, rather than simply accept the programmes broadcast in the traditional way. We show, in detail, how assumptions about consumer behaviour were treated as proven, in part by extrapolating from previous experience, e.g. with the VCR. The purpose of this book is not to report the very latest developments, but rather to examine a part of the history of the design of consumer products before they reached the market. We chose products which were under development in 1988-90, and interviewed a large number of people involved in shaping the ideas about how these products would be used in the home. We wanted to see how designers and marketers coped with the problems of not having reliable information about consumer preferences. In the case of our three product areas, home automation, electronic messaging, and interactive multimedia, we knew how difficult it is to use reliable market research techniques. Consumers who have never heard of e-mail, for example, cannot be expected to answer sensibly questions about whether they would be likely to buy such products. Engineers develop the technology to make new products and services possible, but many others are needed to turn an invention into a widely used product. How do they design such products to appeal to consumers? It would require another book to examine how the processes we observed have been affected by subsequent developments in the market. It was not our intention to follow through these products to the market, but rather to concentrate on one specific phase in the much longer process of innovation in order to answer the question of how producer views about consumers were formulated. We have done this in considerable detail, and we hope that our work will be helpful to those interested in the history of these particular products areas. In addition we think that there is much in these chapters to interest those seeking to get behind the hype of ‘multimedia’ and the ‘information revolution.’ We show how difficult it has been in the past to sell ‘information’ to households, which should tell us something about the difficulties producers still face in opening up these markets. Finally, we see our work as a contribution to redressing a bias in the innovation literature towards industrial technologies and professional products and services. There is still some prejudice against studying consumer technologies, as if these were less intellectually respectable that industrial ones. Many fewer academics research consumer IT than the telecommunications or computing industries, and innovation theorists know much less than they should do about the significance of consumer electronics for IT in general. In completing the research we interviewed a large number of people, many of whom were prepared to give specific information, in confidence, about what were often (at least at the time) commercially sensitive issues. We are grateful to our respondents for their time and frankness, and we have agreed not to identify specific informants by name. Researchers who would like more precise information about sources are welcome to contact us for further information. The aim of our interviews was to get an understanding of how these producers forged the link between R&D (which defines in some sense the functional boundaries of what is possible with the innovation), product development (which comprises choices within these boundaries) and marketing (where the choices made are related to projections of consumer behaviour and likely purchase patterns). Overall, the study is premised on the belief that innovation as a process takes in all of these activities, and that successful innovators work within organisations which are equally attentive to them. Some companies, such as Philips, are often seen by commentators to neglect the marketing dimension of innovation: the company invests heavily in R&D, product design and development, but then often fails effectively to market its new products. In other cases, such as Amstrad’s PCW word processor, the innovation lies not in new technologies but in the application of existing technologies to meet particular needs, and of reducing production costs enough to pit the product against electric typewriters rather than other types of computer or word processor. We wanted, then, to provide a more rounded picture of the innovation process than those arising from studies of R&D labs and to avoid the overly technology-focused view of innovation which arises from concentrating too much on the process of research itself. The discussion of our case studies in Chapter 6 results in a model of the innovation process which reflects these objectives, and embodies the extent to which the common features of the three cases enables a general picture of the innovation process to be drawn. Interviewees were contacted in a variety of ways, in part depending on the nature of the case study. For the home automation study, we were fortunate in being able to enlist the help of the National Economic Development Office (NEDO), which had commissioned a research study from RMDP. Both organisations were helpful in providing leads to potential informants, many of whom were people who had attended NEDO/RMDP conferences. In the case of interactive multimedia, one firm was involved in developing the major consumer product, CD-i, so that interviewing was concentrated among various members of the R&D, product development and marketing staffs, both in the UK and at Philips headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. On the software side, many small firms were engaged in early developments, and leads to them were often provided by Philips managers. As in the home automation case, industry conferences were a major source of information, and provided good opportunities for making contact with (and in some cases interviewing) industry informants. The electronic messaging case was slightly different, and involved more historical detective work, since several efforts to launch consumer products and services had been made in the 1980s, notably and notoriously BT’s Prestel, and the research strategy involved locating key players active at the time. Most of the interviews were conducted in the period from October 1988 to July 1990, although some have been done since then, and we have continued to be actively involved in research and consultancy in this area since completing the fieldwork for this study.

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