11/21/13 20:28
Steve Blank published a very
good articulation of how negatively customers view feature removal.
We all grew up with a physical product mindset: You bought a widget, took it home, and used it as often as you wanted until it wore out. Products don't suddenly gain or lose features. However, as more and more products shift to services, this mental model breaks down.
Steve’s points are all correct, in that these are
violations of customer expectations. The problem is that customer expectations no longer fit reality.
Go read the EULA. Yes, the one no one reads. We
license our books from Amazon. We do not
own them in the traditional sense. To be clear, I think this sucks. But that's the reality. We all signed this faustian bargain when we accepted the EULA.
To fix this, we need a modern version of the
first-sale doctrine, or for a bold publisher to offer DRM-free books. No, I'm not holding my breath for either of those to happen anytime soon.
This is an ideal example of a reality-shift happening without a corresponding mind-shift. We all think of ebooks as working just like the physical books on our shelves. We can't help it, and providers such as Amazon encourage this association. It's just, well, not true.
This applies to virtually every free-to-use online service, from
Facebook to
Posterous, to
Twitter: Sorry, but if you aren't the one paying for it, well, you'll pay for it. One way or another.
The truth is that no service provider is setting out to alienate their customers. They seek the right balance between
all their customers: i.e. between users and advertisers. The Google Maps redesign was done because someone at Google thought it was better for most of their users. Some of us may disagree, but then again, we didn't ante up. So we don't really have a seat at the table do we?
This one is interesting. Technically, Apple did nothing “wrong”. As with Final Cut X, the new iWorks is a new version of iWorks ‘09. In fact, the update leaves the old version on your computer (at least it did for me). Moreover, for many users, iWorks is now free (with a new hardware purchase). So, in theory, you are getting more, for nothing.
Apple made a pretty bad PR blunder by not simply announcing the changes more clearly up front. They could have simply introduced the “new" iWorks as a brand new product, and renamed the old one “iWorks classic” (which you could buy for some exorbitant price, mail order only). This is analogous to what they did with the original iPod when the flash-based ones were introduced. Steve Jobs would have caught this blunder before it happened.
The larger point is that with iWorks, Apple is purposely blurring the lines between a “boxed” product and a service (and a “free” one at that). This might lead to some real violations down the road. What happens when the
next version comes out (if it ever does)? Will it be a forced upgrade, as is the current model?
I don't know what to make of this one. It sounds like a panicked response to the recent fires, and a PR blunder.
It reminds me of the recent
OSX update to disable Java. Apple did a better job there clearly spelling this out as a security measure, and providing instructions on how to re-enable it, at your own risk of course. It seems that Tesla could have taken a similar approach.
These problems are only going to increase as the servicification of the world continues. On one hand, providers need to do a better job clarifying the new rules, and designers need better paradigms for representing service-based products to customers. We can't continue to pretend that nothing has changed.
On the other hand, something along the lines of the “Consumer Bill of Rights" that Steve outlined is needed. However, it's unlikely to come from the courts. As consumers, we have very limited legal rights with a service. The rules are written by company lawyers after all. Any rights are certainly constrained to only what we've paid for (in many cases nothing), and at most for the time period of a subscription (a month, to maybe a year). Companies aren't
obligated to continue offering the same terms indefinitely.
I do agree, however, that smart service companies will respond to this very real customer angst. We need a big company to champion this, and beat their competitors over the head with it. Enterprise companies who have been at this game for years should show the new hotshot consumer services how it's done.
Related: Design, Business.