Complexity As a Barrier To Competition
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most.
—Clement Mok, Chief Creative Officer, Sapient
A story about the development of the first pen which could write in zero gravity illustrates just how critical it is to question assumptions. As you probably know if you've ever tried to write on a vertical surface, ink pens depend on gravity to get the ink to the ball point. Which presents a problem when you want to use them in space. The solution was the now famous Parker space pen, allegedly costing NASA some Two Million Dollars to develop.
As anyone savvy in the ways of the new economy will tell you, the advantage of the cutting edge is that it presents a costly barrier to competition. (In this case the Russians).
Trouble is, nobody bothered to explain to the Russians how formidable this barrier was: They used pencils.
So entrenched is the mind set, upon hearing my little story, one technologist countered by attacking the problems of pencils. He patiently enlightened me about the difficulties and extra weight of lugging around sharpeners. And the potential problems any loose shavings might represent.
I almost hated to mention mechanical pencils.
The original story may be apocryphal, although I doubt entirely so, but my experiences reciting it are just as telling and current. The design doctrine seems clear: complexity and the cutting edge as barriers to competition.
Complexity As A Barrier To Customers
The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.
…She also gave new products to a group of managers from consumer electronics company Philips (PHG.AS), asking them to use them over the weekend. The managers returned frustrated because they could not get the devices to work properly.
—Scientist: Complexity causes 50% of product returns; Reuters
Many programmers don’t fully appreciate my zero code solutions. Consider the instance where a programmer was approached to produce a viewer program for three different platforms. The department wanted others to see pictures of their work. The programmer took the objective “pictures everyone could see,” and basically threw out the requirement. He converted and posted the pictures on the department web site, and everyone was happy. Programmers know this happens all the time, even when they say “I can only do what I’m told.”
Simplicity can’t work without a sophisticated understanding of human desirability. Otherwise, merely stripped of features, products seem simplistic and dumbed down. Desirable simplicity is the evidence of sophisticated design thought which is the true barrier to competition. Contrary to both popular and expert opinion, customers do not want simplicity alone — customers find essentials more desirable.
Resources
- Scientist: Complexity causes 50% of product returns “She said most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process — product definition.”
- Honestly put, “…complexity keeps the paychecks coming.” Of equal candor is the accompanying Resume–Driven Architecture where solving the problem takes a back seat to the technologies used. Worse still, cutting edge technologies become solutions in search of problems. In Fabricated Complexity you see why overcomplication leaves you open to a simple counter.
- Sophistication in design can lead to the competitive edge technological complexity does not. Often the only way to know for sure is to question — as a serious business operation — a simpler solution. I'm talking about an integrated development procedure, rather than the typical negativity that infects many preproject discussions. When you do this with optimism and desirability:
- Questioning why they were making things nobody wants to buy (waste), leads Shaw Fibers to think of carpeting as a renewable resource and carpeting as a service having better business potential.
- Moving from heat, beat and treat energy intensive industrial processes to biomimcry is saving industries money they didn't know they were wasting. New whole system designers see pollution as a design flaw, a signal of inefficiency. In taking the system view, design gains new meaning. Products do not become obsolete at the end of their lifetime. Instead each product (product packaging, and even other forms of waste) starts a new lifecycle as a technical nutrient for an industrial-technical eco-metabolism.
- Green building retrofits which can cost less than regularly scheduled maintenance, and with added energy savings, pay for themselves. The paradox is components and processes designed for multiple contexts are often simpler, more elegant solutions.
- Moving from industrial machine captalism to natural capitalism, industries are making use of the capital they use to throw away. Eventually we may come to the realization capitalism is not an “ism” but an emergent property of self organizing systems.
- Financial Times article urging against head to head imitation and towards innovation as a competitive strategy.
- Cringely writes about the hundred bagger “magnificent extravaganzas” circa 2004.
- What are the assumptions governing a common chair? One company, wanting to foster an innovative, alert state of mind, used an exercise ball as a chair. Even the most complicated chairs are built on an assumption of fixed position, which is the reason for repetitive stress relief exercises. But humans are built to move, and so chair designs grudgingly allow some limited movement. Few are built with movement as a basic assumption, which need not be based on complex chair technology but does require a sophisticated understanding of human beings.
- Every cipher (code) fan knows the story of the German Enigma code, and U.S. use of the American Indian language, Navajo. One relied on the most brilliant mathematics, the other not. In a classic mismatch between superlinear thinking (using the only universal language: mathematics) versus non linear thinking, Germany found its code cracked while America did not. Military history is the study of what happens when linear complexity and brute force meets the unconventional and simple counter tactic. (Critics will seize upon human error in rigidly adhering to the complicated protocols required in Enigma operation. Which simply furthers my point.) You can study up on Codes, Ciphers and Codebreaking at Vectorsite.
- Gillette does a NASA and spends 750 million dollars to apply diamond thin film to a razor blade. You can study Gillette as an example of superlinear thinking and complexity as barrier. The lesson from the apocryphal space pen story is technology obsession takes your focus off the real field of competition — customer objectives, perceptions and desires. Information systems can focus on cutting edge customers and desires, then work back to technologies.
