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Why Technologies Fail
The company had spent millions developing their new technology product. Convinced that people would take to it liked they’d taken to the iPod and the iPhone. The founders couldn’t wait to get out on the streets wearing them.On launch day the energy in the company was palpable. But within a week or so, the product had flopped. People hated it. It worked very well, perhaps too well.
That product was Google Glass. People wearing them were called “glassholes.” It wasn’t long before they were pulled from the market. Google Glasses have gone on to find some niche market success and AR glasses seem to slowly be creeping bak into the market.
There are likely, we can’t know for sure, more failed technologies than successful ones throughout history. There are many reasons a technology will fail, but there is always one main factor that decides whether a technology succeeds or fails. Culture.
In our modern capitalist societies, we tend to see products failing with this lens. And while that is a significant reason, it’s bigger than that and has more to do with culture and where a technology fits, or doesn’t, with societies and cultures.
Some technologies are successful in one culture, but not another. Some Inuit tribes in the arctic used snowshoes while others used kayaks. This was down to cultural norms and traditions who saw the technologies in different ways.
Technologies are often assigned meaning and purpose within a culture in the way it used. One example is the way truck drivers in India and Pakistan create incredibly lavish and intricate art work on their trucks and inside the cabins.
Even well designed technology products, like Google Glass or even Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player can fail to gain cultural traction. Technology companies call this product-market fit. Many do a fair bit of market research in the design phase and for marketing, but today, many technology companies don’t think about cultural fit. The ones that do, tend to have greater chances of success.
Sometimes a technology may be ahead of it’s time and the infrastructure needed for it to be successful may not quite be there. Boo.com was a fashion retailer that started in the later phase of the .com boom in 1998 and shuttered in 200. It was a superb product, but most internet…
