Walt's comments on ease of use in Home Networking and Internet Sharing
I quote from Walt's comment:
"However, I can say that in 1999, "home networking" was immensely too hard for mainstream users, and in fact it still is too hard. Even today, I believe that 90% of people who have Wi-Fi or wired ethernet in their homes didn't install these things to create a "home network." They don't move files around the house, or even share printers. They simply want internet access in multiple rooms."
Walt is right, it WAS too hard, and it still IS too hard, 7 years later.
Here's the problem. If
an entrepreneur were to approach the investor community and say that they have a vision for a line of consumer oriented
products that connected consumers to the internet and delivered the internet
throughout the house so easily and so wonderfully that even Walt Mossberg would REALLY like it, would the investment community shower
that entrepreneur with money? with fame
and attention? I submit the answer is NO
NO NO.
I submit the investment community
would say that consumers won't care, won't value and and won't pay for
excellence or remarkableness, and delivering the internet throughout the home simply and without complication would be viewed by many as remarkable.
Are the investors right? It's hard to tell since the
consumer has so rarely had the chance to purchase really compelling, well
designed high tech products, particularly those that actually touch the
internet. (It's as if when a product
touches anything with IP in it, it all goes to pieces!) The iPod has had a lot of success and some claim it's the physical design and the coolness - but those who really pay attention have identified the tight integration with iTunes on the desktop as really crucial to the coolness.
Walt has carried the flag for
"great" in tech products for a long time, but has it really had an
impact? Is anybody listening? Are consumers standing up and demanding
"Mossberg-esque" products?
Seth Godin argues in his book Purple Cow for making remarkable products, but many days it seems there
aren't that many truly remarkable products in the tech industry (see my blog post on
CES 2006). Why not? Do consumers suddenly lose their interest in
remarkable when they turn to tech? Or is
it that no one in tech has faith in remarkable products (Steve Jobs
aside) and so won't make the investment of time, energy, creativity, and, to an
extent, money in them?
I'm interested in perspectives on this - how do we get tech
products, and in particular consumer oriented tech products, to be remarkable
and then how do we get consumers to buy remarkable?
Product developers in the home space are caught in a Catch-22: everyone wants unique, beautiful, easy to use products, but they also want them at bargain basement prices. You and I and everyone else who has ever attempted to create a software product knows that getting it right is far less work than making it easy. The next step to making it beautiful is so rarely attempted, let alone accomplished, that I haven't had the opportunity to even try in a 25 year as a programmer, software engineer, and product designer.
There are a few companies, groups, and organizations out there attempting, and sometimes succeeding, at making software beautiful. As you not above, Apple has accomplished this several times. Many other examples are applications for the Mac. Examples include just about anything from the Omni Group and the lovely application "Delicious Library" from Wil Shipley, one of the founders of the Omni Group.
Sadly enough, I haven't seen any such effort applied to home networking, and I fear I won't. This is doubly sad, because the marketplace has changed since we started DoBox; the technological starting point for such an undertaking is freely available these days, in the form of several free Linux distributions that run on various vendors wireless access points. All that is needed is a team with the vision to actually create a home network that ordinary people can use and the pool of dollars to express that vision and market it.
I'll submit that the stumbling block that cannot be overcome is the device between the user and the network. I get asked by friends and even brand new acquaintances all the time, "Can you help me setup my laptop for my wireless network?"
Oddly enough, nobody expects the average homeowner to be able to install and configure their multi-unit entertainment system; most are completely willing to pay someone to come install the big boob tube, but the idea of paying someone to configure their home network is unpalatable. Perhaps we have set the expectations too high? It just might be that we cannot possibly create a home network that even a "twelve o'clock flasher" can use. On the other hand, the TV/VCR industry overcame the twelve o'clock flasher problem a decade ago, maybe we just need to take a step back and look at the entire network, not just the device.
I'd like to see someone with Apple's attention to the end user take on home networking. Marketing any such device against the channel and marketing might of Cisco/Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear will be a daunting task, but you can't even start on that until you've actually made something better. Nobody is trying, as far as I can tell.
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