OK – here is one interesting way that Skype is like TiVo.
For a long time, many of my friends had TiVo – and I didn’t. I couldn’t quite imagine why I would want yet another contraption that I had to program. And somehow it recorded stuff from my television. Why would I want that? Well – it turned out for me that the ability to time shift (but I didn’t know this was the term when I first did it), and to not watch commercials were the killer features. I now can’t imagine how I would watch TV any other way. We now watch the news most nights when we get home – and watch the 30 minute program in about 20 minutes – whenever we want.
So ‘I can’t imagine why I want it’ became – ‘I can’t live without it.’
Skype came on to me in the same way. At first I knew people who were using it. They were often unhappy – but kept using it. I had an engineering staff in San Francisco, and a contract team in Ukraine. One day – my team discovered Skype – and would spend hours a day (in various combinations) on Skype. This replaced some (but not all) IM communications, and made email communications much more specific – with code samples or documentation. The key was cost (telephone calls to Ukraine were prohibitive) and convenience (it is much easier than dialing).
In both cases – these tools offered some specific advantages over alternatives. If you don’t need (or don’t recognize) the advantages, you aren’t going to adopt them. Once you do – you can’t live without them. But how do technologies get past the ‘unrecognizable advantage’ phase? And how can we users figure out which technologies are going to take a place in our pantheon of dire necessities?
The answer would be, of course, the ultimate key to marketing success.
On a recent weekend, we took a small road trip, and spent a couple of days in the Sierra Nevada mountains where there was cell coverage only in the small community of Graeagle, California. We drove through town periodically on our way from here to there (forest, desert, historic trains, and rivers to visit). We passed through town several times each day.
With push email on my iPhone every time we drove through town my phone automatically collected any incoming email, and if I paused to reply, sent out the reply only having to make sure that the message got to the network—the network would take care of getting it to its target. Everything worked as designed. Later, if I didn’t respond immediately, I could review the email messages, and craft replies as appropriate, even though I was offline.
What was annoying was the way my voice messages were handled. My iPhone has visual voicemail (which is great as an incremental improvement), so voicemail messages also came in as I went through Graeagle. I could listen to them, but I couldn’t respond, unless I parked and sat still in Graeagle holding on to the narrow band of live coverage. With email I can craft a response without network to go out when network is good—not so with voice.
On one pass through town, Mary and I both collected a couple of voice messages, one concerning a possible immediate problem at our home. We ended up parked on a corner by a country store where the local “visitor information” resided, after hours of course—no coffee available—trying to call people. In one case, we kept getting a busy signal (weren’t even so lucky as to get dumped into voice mail), and finally gave up and sent email.
Wouldn’t it be nice if voice calls could work more like email (for messaging) – and still let me talk live when that is possible?
-Jim
