Dean Bubley has a nice list of things that will happen in the wireless market this year. Several caught my eye, one of them being that in our rush for all things "converged," we might be missing something, and taht is that people might be better at managing multiple devices, numbers and identities than we usually give them credit for.
Bubley argues that suppliers and service providers have a hard time creating the "one device that does everything" because, in fact, "people are happy with complexity."
"People like multiplicity," Bubley argues. "They want multiple service providers."
Some people certainly seem not to mind complexity, multiple bills or providers. Others probably prefer to buy in a sort of "best of breed" mode, despite some incremental friction.
I suspect that although lots of people say they like triple play services because it is more convenient using one provider instead of three, the adoption driver really is the discount.
The issue here probably is that many attempts to converge functions, identities and so forth involve some compromises, some effort and some limitations. People might be willing to put up with some amount of complexity or effort to get more choice.
But not much. According to the Reuters news service, half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices.
Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls,” Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.
The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.
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