Some may speak of the Long Tail (and my ebooks fit in there nicely), but there are other curves that govern business. Take the inverted parabola, for instance, where things improve to a peak, and then begin to drop off.
Eventually a product gets good enough that any change makes it worse.
I like to put it this way: there is one best design for any product; because of sellers needing change (in order to sell more), the design is changed, resulting in a less-better product -- because it is no longer optimal.
For example, Tide is an optimal product that cleans clothes good enough. But to sell more product, Proctor & Gambel have changed the product, to add bleach, to add smells of various kinds, etc. Now the product is sub-optimal, because I find the perfume smell(s) annoying. Tide has drooped down the other side of the inverted parabola.
The Windows operating system reached its peak with XP, and now Vista leads the drop off. As one Microsoft insider blogged, Vista was about meeting shipping deadlines, not about features.
Chris Pirillo is feeling the heat for going against those who think parabolic curves are vertical asymptotic (only ever getting larger). And he's really ticked off at their myopia: "I’m not p****d off at the people telling me to switch to OS X, I’m really p****d off at the people who are blaming me for Vista’s shortcomings." His crime? Going back to XP.
We in the tech world have been spoiled by over two decades of new = better. For the last several years, we've been reaching the top of the inverted parabola: CPU speeds have stalled, word processor features sets are set in stone, and Windows isn't going to get any better any more.
The upside to being on the downside of the inverted parabola? Stability. We can now get our work done, instead of wasting time and cash on upgrades.
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