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In the digital age, business and IT leaders must think and act differently. The disparate tech items that people once relied on have fallen by the roadside as devices like the iPhone or iPad take their place, offering integrated functionality, writes Samuel Greengard, in an article for Baseline.
“We used to rely on a spate of separate devices: a camera, digital audio recorder, landline phone, video camera, DVD player, MP3 player and various remote controls,” Greengard wrote. “All are gone or rapidly disappearing.”
While an iPhone or similar device might not perform all the tasks that a dedicated device does, most people are happy to reach a specific level of functionality with their integrated devices, at about 70 to 80 percent, Greengard wrote. People are choosing convenience over functionality, particularly when some functionality would go unused, and it’s easier to carry around just one device, he added.
Instead of being open to this trend, device-specific manufacturers keep on doing what they’ve been doing all along. They may make a few changes, but these are primarily technical in nature and not necessarily progressive.
Greengard offered the example of photography, noting that the industry has struggled to adapt. Sales have decreased for manufactures and Kodak has gone bankrupt. “… Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony and others have done very little to advance photography,” he stated, noting that even his iPhone has “richer capabilities” like geotagging and on-device editing than does his Nikon DSLR.
Dedicated cameras do have limitations, however, but this is essentially because they use the same type of image-capture techniques that film cameras do only with different features. However, to change the essential way a camera records images is difficult and this circles back to Greengard’s original point—that manufacturers of one-purpose devices need to change the way they think about the products they market. Companies, markets and careers depend on that.
Click here to read the full article on Baseline.