Mike writes a nice, succinct piece on TechDirt about how technology often doesn’t work in new launches – or certainly fails to work properly.
So, it’s not that surprising to hear people who are now testing out some of the new 3G services out there talk about all the problems and glitches they’re facing. The hardware has compatibility problems with their computers, or causes crashes. You can’t always see the network. When you can see the network, it’s not always easy to connect to the network. When you do connect to the network you may not get the bandwidth that you were promised. When you do get the bandwidth you were promised, the latency may make everything seem much slower.
This scenario is actually worse than it seems and can delay successful uptake for far longer than it need be. The reason is that the first purchasers are disappointed and don’t recommend them to their friends. Worse, they slag them off and return the purchase. And then are reluctant to buy again even when the tech issues are solved.
When 3 launched in the UK, I got a very early model. There were two issues I had with it:
1. You couldn’t make voice calls without dropping the connection on every occasion. To the extent that I used my old, 02 phone to make calls, even though my 3 calls were totally free. That’s how bad it was.
2. There was a 12 second delay whenever you connected with their server. So you want to download the footie (soccer to our US chums) highlights. You went to their server side browser (12 secs), clicked Football (12 secs), found the match you wanted (12 secs) and clicked download (12 secs). Then and only then, it downloaded – pretty quickly from then, to be honest.
Oh and the phone was ugly and difficult to navigate and use.
So I returned it, like 10′s of thousands of others.
I’m sure we’ll see similar scenarios from other networks. Then 3G will be declared dead in the water. Then in about two years we’ll suddenly see a surprising number of people happily using 3G and we’ll have forgotten what things used to be like.
This was certainly the scenario with WAP, which has now gone mainstream.
Tech companies will never wait to get things 100% right before launch. If they did, their lunch would be eaten by less scrupulous competitors. In addition, user Innovators will put up with a lot of shit anyway in the beginning, within reason.
But if only they’d just wait until they had a service 80% right, instead of 30%, the world would be a much happier place for everyone from gadget freaks to geeks to the tech companies themselves.
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