by Tom Goodwin
A key part of this process is that, as the technology matures, it tends to converge on relatively similar optimum solutions, as illustrated in Figure 4.1. Websites today look more similar to each other than when people first started designing them; hotel rooms today now look broadly alike because lessons have been shared; mobile phones once looked radically different, now they look the same. Design is like evolution – we slowly mutate and adapt in different ways, before we generally become more similar. If cosmetic surgery continues like it does today, just imagine how many people will have the ‘perfect nose’ in the future. Eventually, just as everything has converted to one optimal solution that everybody adopts, a paradigm leap can be made whereby the assumed parameters can change to new parameters, and a new quest towards the new optimal solution can begin, as illustrated in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.1 A brief to the optimal solution
Figure 4.2 A brief to the new optimal solution
What these companies do is unleash the power of the paradigm shift. They leap from one world of possibilities to another, from one paradigm to another, to an optimal solution based on a whole new world of thinking. This is a paradigm leap, and it’s the essence of disruption.
Avoiding the local maximum
Imagine, if you will, that you are walking in rather gently sloping but hilly terrain and it’s very misty. For some elaborate reason you’ve been told to find the highest hill you can. You are likely to look around, see what looks like the most elevated terrain and walk up to it. At any moment in time your goal is to keep getting higher. If it was to get dark, your only navigational aid would be to feel that you were going uphill. It would be a sure-fire way to get to the top of that mound. Yet you will never know if that was the highest ground in the entire area, or just the only one that you could see.
This is called the difference between the local maximum and the global maximum and it’s a big problem in design. In life we are unable to see all options. We don’t know what material science will make possible, what new thinking will develop, or how the world will change. We can only ever go up based on what we can see. This process is illustrated in Figure 4.3, which shows the difference between the locally optimized design and the global maximum or optimal design, and the leap between them.
Figure 4.3 The leap between the locally optimized and the optimal design
Historically we have assumed that TV signals are best delivered by electromagnetic waves. We have assumed that near field communication (NFC) cards are the best way to make ticketing solutions for underground systems. We’ve long assumed that combustion engine cars are the way forward, or that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the best form of scanning the body. We assume that nuclear fusion will one day be the best way to derive energy, or maglev trains will be the best way to move around. But we don’t yet know for sure.
It could be that there are better solutions; it could be that when we get to the top of these peaks, we realize we should have explored another route, ascended a totally different mound. It’s this process of people reaching the top of other peaks that best explains the dynamic of disruption today. Disruptive companies are those that took a different route. They saw things differently, they came to the problem from a different angle. It wasn’t aeronautics experts or balloonists who pioneered powered human flight, but bicycle engineers. It’s not helicopter makers who are pioneering human-carrying drones, but Chinese toy companies. We need to explore this dynamic further and investigate the actions needed.
The paradigm leap in action
On 1 July 1979, the first Sony Walkman went on sale, launching a new era in music (Haire, 2009). Sony had just created the first-ever personal music player. We could now take the music we loved with us, and without the arm-ache of the ghetto-blaster. It came at a cost. The first personal cassette players were massive, cost the equivalent of $500 at today’s currency exchange rates, had terrible sound quality, skipped badly, offered awful battery life, and best (or worst!) of all, didn’t even have a rewind function. We had to spin tapes around on pencils. It’s wonderful to look back at our consumption of albums on tape and the thinking we did. The product was a reasonable success, selling out 30,000 units in the first three months in Japan (Adner, 2012).
Over a period of decades, with huge R&D investments from Sony and competitors alike, many errors, as well as endless rounds of customer feedback, things got much, much better. Not least the name. First marketed in the USA as the Soundabout, it was soon changed to the Walkman, and came in a choice of colours. Despite the competition, Sony kept ahead of its rivals. Even 10 years after its first device, Sony’s Walkman retained a 50 per cent market share in the USA and 46 per cent in Japan, in a space seething with competitors. Sony maintained its profit margin, regardless of the entry of many new competitors to the market, with a price premium of approximately $20 over rival offers (Adner, 2012).
Over time the device improved. It got Dolby (B, then C), rechargeable batteries, even rewind buttons. Engineers got better at making components smaller, as they always do, so the size of the personal cassette player got smaller, until finally, with a smart aluminium casing, it was only a little bigger than the cassette itself. Miniaturization wasn’t easy, batteries needed to be improved, motors needed to get more efficient, step-up converters were invented and made smaller. At the same time the device got way cheaper. By 2002 it wasn’t uncommon to see personal radio cassette players in gas stations for those impulse purchases on the go. Designers had fun: we got sports models with yellow plastic, radio functions were added. Life was good.
The improvements came fast then slowed down, and it got to a point where the improvements got smaller. It was easy to reduce the size initially but once it had shrunk to barely bigger than a cassette tape, improvements were marginal, and the law of diminished returns we mentioned earlier set in.
The Walkman is what changed our relationship with music. It became something we could curate, copy, and take with us. It made us love music, and as a soundtrack to our life, it was the background music that embellished what we had.
The CD player era
At the time the Walkman design peaked – the very best music-playing machine the world had ever collectively crafted – came the very worst personal CD player ever made. It was huge, far more expensive than the best Walkman it replaced at $450, and had an awful battery life. It would skip all the time. The LCD display was tiny and displayed very little information. It was the worst CD player ever, but it was still better than the best Walkman. This was digital sound. It came with no tape degradation and no winding in the spaghetti after an accident.
We’d made a paradigm leap. We’d gone from ever smaller, incremental design improvements that worked towards an increasingly easy-to-envision optimal goal, with everyone on the same page and working towards solving the same problems, to a whole new canvas for design where the end result wasn’t clear.
We now had new criteria against which to optimize design, new constraints to shape the progress towards the optimal design and new problems to solve. The criteria that once held back the cassette player were different. The problems to solve now were new and the expertise needed wildly different. Laser engineers replaced electromagnetic sensor experts and Dolby engineers were replaced by people who knew about caching digital memory to stop skipping. Designers who loved slow, high-torque motors now needed to know about fast-spinning, low-torque designs.
Even recording music faced new challenges. How do you compress music without making it seem cold and flat? Can you remove information about frequencies we can’t hear, without changing the soul of the music? Even breaking up music from continuous to segmented had rather profound meanings: for example, is it okay to have ‘tracks’ of a few seconds between other tracks or should those little warm-up flurries or contextual introductions be attached to the song?
The worst MP3 players
As Discmans became marvellously cheap, remarkably thin, and music moved from analogue to digital, some
one had a new idea: what if the physical media wasn’t needed? What if the music was lifted and liberated from the storage medium and was stored in the music player? This was a huge shift. Until now music had been physical, and media had been too. We lived with VHS tapes, magazines, CDs, laser disks. Media was something we bought and touched. Facing high costs of storage, music could only be digitized if it was compressed and the MP3 format was born.
The first-ever MP3 player was of course both marvellous and awful. It was launched in 1997 by Saehan Information Systems, and sold as its ‘MPMan’ player in Asia in spring 1998 (Van Buskirk, 2005). While the battery power was fine, the device small and not too expensive, new issues arose. User experience was a concern. To put music into the device, the music first had to be encoded in the MP3 format by an encoder provided by the user, and then transferred via the parallel port to the docking station that connected to the portable player device. Another issue was storage: the two versions of the player offered 32 or 64MBs of capacity, enough to store a measly 6 or 12 songs, less than most albums.
There were legal issues too. MP3 files were not readily available. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Associate Director of Anti-Copyright Infringement, Frank Creighton, initially said the MPMan had ‘no function other than playing material that was stolen from record companies’ (Kaufman, 1998).
It’s here we first see the uncomfortable relationship between regulation and the law and the spirit of disruption, a topic we will visit later in this book.
The problems the MP3 player brought with it were again totally new. The company that would produce a breakthrough wouldn’t be Sony, with their amazing engineers who’d perfected CDs and lasers and cassettes and motors. It wouldn’t be a company that knew batteries better than anyone. It wouldn’t be material scientists who could make things thinner. It would be people who understood the human-centred design experience. People who knew that in this era, how the product functioned was not the most vital thing. It would be companies that understood software and who were also large enough to negotiate with the record industry and be taken seriously. It was of course unlikely to be a company like Sony, who were making too much money selling physical music.
What made the iPod successful wasn’t the iPod. It was iTunes, and it took time. Steve Jobs knew that on its own the MP3 player was useless. He knew that in order for the device to have value, other building blocks needed to be in place first. The success of the iPod would be dependent not on a better device, but on a better ecosystem: a faster internet to make downloading songs fast enough, record labels to be ready to sell music as MP3 files. He realized that innovation was never about being first per se, but to be first in a meaningful way at the right time.
The first-generation iPod for Mac retailed at $399 and could store up to 1,000 songs. It was a revelation. Now you could take any piece of music you could ever hope to own with you. It had an intuitive interface design and was lightweight. Despite being available only for Mac users, which was 10 per cent of all computer users at the time, the iPod was the fastest selling MP3 player to ever hit the market (Adner, 2012).
We had entered the paradigm where software mattered more than hardware. Apple announced the iTunes Music Store, an online retail hub to browse and purchase music for 99 cents per song and within two years iTunes’ library had grown to 1.5 million songs. Apple had understood the relationship between service and device. It would make little profit from selling songs at 99 cents per download, but the ecosystem mattered. The iTunes store gave the iPod legitimacy in a world of shady MP3 accessibility.
MP3 players got better, but not quite in the same way. They got smaller and lighter, storage was increased, devices were cheaper, but progress felt different. It was more about the interface. Apple iTunes was most people’s main experience of the device. It became about how easy it was to find music, how nice it felt to do so. It became about reducing the pain points of coding music in such a way that it aided distribution, or digital rights management protection. It was about making payment easy, making synchronizing seem obvious. More than anything else, Apple had to guide people into a new way of thinking about music in the easiest way possible. Again, the skills needed were different and put the focus on coders, not engineers, as well as user interface design, not product design. Deals had to be made with record labels rather than with aluminium rollers. Most core Apple staff skills were more useful in this paradigm.
Our relationship with technology changed too. We expected to own more, to listen to what we wanted when we wanted. We’d skip things we didn’t love or feel like at that time. Technology started to shape how we behaved now, not reflect how we behaved then.
iPods took over the world, music became digital and the development of the internet and the shift to the smartphone brought another huge paradigm shift.
The streaming age
The internet meant we no longer needed to own music, we just needed access to it. As home broadband became more prevalent and 3G connectivity spread on phones, we no longer needed to store music or to own music; we just needed to access it, at all times, immediately.
And this is where we are now. The world of portable music blends into the world of smartphone design. We now find ourselves with faster connectivity, better battery life, a need for music videos, for higher resolution screens, for larger OLED screens. The whole paradigm has shifted again.
Phones have changed so much of our lives and so many industries. Even in the specific context of music, they changed more than we ever realized, and they once again changed our relationship with music. Walkmans allowed us to take music with us, to augment our lives; CDs allowed us to listen only to the music we loved, we could skip tracks immediately; MP3 players allowed us to think of music with abundance not scarcity; and streaming meant we discovered and selected music in new ways.
Streaming means the new challenges are of managing abundance, aiding discovery, and making money in this era. Our relationship moved from the album to the single, from the record label to the content gateway. The distribution costs of music, the hosting and the production, tended to zero.
We no longer needed record labels to make well-produced music and distribute it. We no longer needed companies to merchandise it, nor albums bundled as units to ‘buy’ and to access music. We had a relationship with the band or artist and the stuff we loved. We became directly connected to what we wanted. We are now firmly in the streaming age. We care about Spotify or Apple Music or Pandora, we don’t care about physical media, record labels, bitrates, and costs.
Leaps in design paradigms surround us
The changes in music device follow a set pattern: technology and design make radical progress, which then slows to find an optimal device, followed by a huge leap to another way of thinking. This is not something unique to personal music. We see these leaps everywhere.
When transporting goods in the UK for example, for millennia we functioned with the paradigm of transporting goods by horse, before a sudden move to shipping goods by canal resulted in increased construction of canals. These canals improved in their set-up and construction over time, to be replaced dramatically by the advent of a cheaper and faster method of transporting goods: railway. Railway technology in turn progressed in huge leaps and bounds before being destroyed again by the use of large trucks transporting goods via roads.
With personal transportation we’ve had the era of horseback riding, then horse-drawn cars, then combustion-powered horseless carriages, and now it looks as if we’re on the edge of the next paradigm, electric-powered cars. It appears the entire infrastructure of petrol stations will soon need to be rebuilt for electric cars. In the near future we may go from the era of owning cars to the era of getting access to self-driving cars. We are unlikely to own them, but we may rent access much like a data plan on a mobile phone. Suddenly car parking spaces are entirely freed up as cars can move around freely and out of cities when demand is lower. Suddenly our commutes may become longer a
nd more productive and the shape and size of cities may change. Cars themselves will change. Vehicles are currently designed to be suitable for all the most common types of usage. A typical adult needs a car that fits five people, can travel at 85mph and can do 400-mile journeys with ease, even if they drive it alone 95 per cent of the time, at less than 40 mph and do fewer than 40 miles per day. If we are to access self-driving cars there is no reason why they shouldn’t be much more specialized vehicles. We may have lounge-like vehicles stacked with large screens and room for eight people for multi-family trips. We may see absurd luxury cars that fit two people for couples’ romantic weekends, or pod-like vehicles that fit one person and no luggage, travel at less than 50 mph and act only for commuters. More will change in this paradigm than anyone realizes.
We have had eras of shopping: the local store, the department store, the shopping mall and now online stores. Paradigms are everywhere. We once kept time with sundials, then had large mechanical clocks in town centres, then mechanical pocket watches, quartz watches and now two-thirds of teenagers don’t carry a watch at all, they use their phone (Clark, 2007). It’s likely one day we’ll have health sensors or payment bands on our wrists instead.
The phone has eaten other devices too. We had the paradigm of the camera obscura, then the photographic camera, the digital camera, and now we just tend to use phones. Initially, smartphones increased demand for proper cameras, before becoming so good that they ate that market. We had black & white cathode ray tubes in televisions once, then the colour CRT TV, then we saw plasma TVs develop, to be overtaken by LCD and then LED TVs. Yet now increasingly we watch videos on our phones and not on the television.