Rapidly changing technologies?

A friend e-mailed a scanned clipping from a newspaper – in itself an indication of change, he would have posted it at one time – which listed a range of skills for dealing with technologies that are no longer needed. For example, changing the ribbon on a typewriter, winding a watch, getting up to change a TV channel, using the choke in a car … and plenty more. Newspapers love lists almost as much as market research into human behaviour, but it indicates the challenge facing new product development. OK so a number of these little wrinkles for using yesterday’s technology are obsolete, but on the other hand it still seems to take an age for new technologies to get into general use. Take the case of compact fluorescent lamps – CFLs – I was involved in their launch in 1980. Nearly 30 years on they are much more widespread but still way short of being universally used to replace Swan’s and Edison’s 19th century invention. Another lighting example is the promotion and take up of new dimming technologies that have been available for a decade or more but still in a tiny minority of total dimmers sold. In fact what the list actually demonstrates is not so much the advance of new technologies but easier use of the old concepts, improvement and evolution rather than invention and revolution. An iPod plays music same as a wind-up gramophone, just better; today’s motor car bristles with modern technology but most of the roads we drive it on were laid out by the Romans or ramble round ancient fields and river crossings established by the Anglo Saxons. So actions like filling a fountain pen, lowering a stylus (or needle) on to a vinyl record and using carbon paper may all be lost skills, but the tasks of writing, playing music and copying are still relevant. We just have better ways on doing things now. So the NPD marketing executive would do well to revisit the tasks his customers are needing to accomplish, to evaluate how new technologies can help in improving achieving the task and then figure out how to embody that into a product that can be successfully solved profitably. Not much to ask really!