Consuming the future

We’ve seen a lot of great new products over the last few years, many of them enthusiastically adopted; smart phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, netbooks, and often a new model every few months. I hate throwing gear away because there’s no meaningful upgrade path, but we’re often presented with no choice in a consumption driven society.

It seems clear that the world of tomorrow is going to be poorer: much of the pre-crisis money never actually existed, it was borrowed from the future. Whatever the reason, everyone is going to have less to spend. Production volumes are dropping, a feature of recession anyway, which combined with badly weakened Western currencies is going to lead to higher prices. So how is product development going to react?

The focus of product development, and maybe life in general, should shift from new products to incremental improvement. With little money around, the time is right to consider total cost of ownership: I want most of my kit to last a while, but still do a useful job.

Building on existing products rather that new launches will be the path. Longer component design lives, combined with modularity minimise the scale of component replacement necessary to add new functionality: no more ditching the iPod because your music collection has grown.

I also expect product ranges to shrink, freeing funding to concentrate on those with a real market and user base. The same will be true of functionality, every product has features almost nobody uses: why so many cup holders?

Consolidation is the theme, so tomorrow will be smaller, but I suspect better for it.