A co-worker was given the BlackBerry Storm as an early holiday present and I was eager to tinker with it after reading the not so favorable reviews on the device. With an open mind, I experimented with it for a while and after some unpremeditated frustration, gave it back and made the automatic comparison that the experience with it was nothing resembling to the iPhone. For her, it is the best touch-screen device ever but unfortunately I already have a preconceive notion of what a device with this capability should feel like and it’s that comparison factor that I did that I’m mostly interested in exploring.
As consumers, we innately compare one product or service from another so as to choose the one that best suits our needs but sometimes that very distinction that we do, is what tends to make or break newness.
Take for example the recent shutdown of Pownce, which despite being bought off by Six Apart, the reason I think it didn’t lift off is because it was too comparable to Twitter with the exception of a few unique features. You don’t need all these services that have sprung out of pure competition, especially when they all essentially serve the same purpose. Products are different but consider the struggling Zune against your iPod which sales alone speaks for which one is more popular.
The perception of what you consider one thing better than the other is based on which service or product you first had a satisfying user experience with, so the fact that I’m biased towards anything Apple is not going to change the mind of someone who’s utilized PCs their entire life. My first MP3 player was an iPod so I would expect nothing less from other devices who claim to do the same.
There’s new innovation being introduced everyday and those companies that are able to take advantage of it first and create something different, will have the advantage of having customers who will use them as a cornerstone for all the other repetitive stuff that will come along.
