 Technology Development  Changes in consumer attitude towards new technology  In the current slump of online and technology related markets, the problems may be deeper than just unrealistic business plans and earning forecasts. The consumer’s growing unwillingness to adopt every new gadget showed up in weaker than expected holiday sales late last year. Slowing PC sales, experienced across the board by hardware manufacturers, point toward a widely discussed shift in consumer attitude. Are the normally quoted reasons for this shift correct? |
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Implications
Technology providers need to be careful in analyzing the latest shifts in buyer behavior Reasons for this shift may be different than the usually quoted move from a PC-centric to an appliance-centric technological landscape. |
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 Introduction When Steve Jobs presented his “vision of the future” for Apple during his MacWorld keynote speech last week, he unwittingly may have exposed one of the biggest underlying— and currently generally unrecognized — trends behind the widely discussed slump in technology that has been dragging down the stock market as of late. Steve Jobs talked about how he envisioned the Macintosh becoming the “hub of the digital lifestyle,” the centerpiece holding together all those digital gizmos the consumer industry is showering us with nowadays, ranging from intelligent cellphones to MP3 players, digital camcorders and handheld computing devices. It remains to be seen whether Apple will be able to turn this vision into a tangible, moneymaking advantage for the Macintosh platform. It is quite possible, however, that Steve Jobs has detected one of the strong emerging trends of the postdot.com technology landscape: consumers of technology, on every level, from consumer to IT manager, are facing a profound shift in underlying meaning behind it all. The sense of disillusionment, which became evident in the weaker than expected end-of-year sales both in the computer and consumer device side of things, may not simply be “consumer fatigue”: it could indicate a more profound sense of consumer disappointment with the overall way in which technology evolves. If this theory is confirmed, it may well mean that technology providers have to rethink A LOT of things: just coming out with a cheaper and more powerful version of whatever you are selling may not be enough. A loss of meaning One could argue that what drove the unbelievable (and of course overhyped) excitement behind the Web was based on a sense of direction: we were all part of a bigger trend, a revolution moving towards a new meaning. The online world, the whole digital space which had begun to emerge, was perceived as belonging to some new schema, a new order that made people believe that there was some sort of deeper meaning in all this, a new world order where everybody had a renewed chance to make his mark. A brave new world with new laws not just simply new technology which adds a few gizmos to our already overflowing shopping cart. Instead, we wind up with a dotcom market which is depressed, which doesn't yield the phenomenal returns everybody had hoped for, and a technology scene which is exploding with gadgets we possibly don’t need just as much as the marketing hype wants to make us believe. The end-user, the consumer, should not care whether or not there is a shakeout in the dotcom market. Any industry goes through strong and weak phases: when the car industry is in a slump, the individual customer doesn't care about it, and shouldn't. But in the emerging digital landscape, the situation is different. What if the consumer felt shortchanged by a technology revolution he never really understood? What if he felt that there was no meaning behind all this? What if this presumed revolution wasn’t one after all? Making it all make sense Of course all this is nothing more than a wild guess. But it nevertheless may be worth considering. Something which evolves as fast as digital technology and the Web is at great risk. If something goes wrong, things can implode as fast as they have grown. In other words, if the bursting of the dotcom bubble is not only about unrealistic business plans and scared investors, it may have far reaching implications. The boom of the digital economy was very much based on the underlying idea of convergence: the new technology was considered a revolution because all these different pieces of hardware, software and networking equipment would eventually talk to each other, integrate harmoniously into a coherent whole which would make all of our lives simpler and better. Watch out A compelling vision But does it still hold? Perhaps all this has become all together too big, too fragmented. Perhaps the consumer is slowly moving on to something else as his pet preoccupation.This is the real risk in the current situation. Common analysis of the current technology situation has it that the market was overhyped and that it is coming back down to a more reasonable level of expectations. While this is certainly true, we nevertheless have to take into account the possibility that we are not only dealing with a temporary slowdown in a hectic field, but with an underlying trend, a growing disappointment of the consumer with the digital world A disappointment, not with the individual elements, but with the integration of all of the different pieces. In that respect, Steve Jobs is right: a center is desperately needed for the “digital lifestyle.” But is it really going to be the personal computer? Time will tell. 16Jan2001 ©2000 Pfeiffer Consulting |
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