On his blog, Michael Mace has opined what he considers to be widely known, but not often explicitly stated three laws of technology strategy.

I put some comments on his blog taking exception to “law” number 2, which says ‘design for a need, not desire.’ I’ll come back to my exception in a minute.

To be fair, there simply isn’t enough detail in his post to grasp fully what he means. That’s always the problem with pithy maxims.

Looking at what Michael does and his background, I make the assumption that he is coming from a business perspective here and that these maxims are really tech-business rules. After all, he calls them laws of technology strategy.

I have no problem with these maxims in that context and I would probably prefer to follow his advice were I only concerned with betting on a business. The ‘design for a problem’ maxim is a common maxim among tech investors. In fact, they will ask ‘what problem does this solve?’

This has to be separated out from technological innovation itself, which is very often driven by desire, often akin to playing.

However, the real issue here is that technological innovation often can’t follow the design-for-need or solve-a-problem approach because the need or problem might not exist in the market. It is not enough, as Michael suggests, to get in the heads of consumers and try to figure out what they might need before they know it. How can that be possible? It doesn’t even have to be that novel, by the way, for users not to know if they need it, or not. When I worked on GSM, before its launch, nearly everyone I knew said that they didn’t really need nor want a mobile phone, believe it or not!

When designing something new in the absence of a stated need, all that one is often left with is one’s own desire to see the product come to life. Such a locus of development has led to countless success stories in both innovation and the market.

I almost always used to start my tech seminars with a slide showing one of McLuhan’s aphorisms, which was ‘Fish don’t know of the existence of water until beached.’

I used to re-word it to things like ‘Kids don’t know of the existence of mobiles until they lose them,’ and so on. What this means is that many technological products only solve a problem after the fact. We didn’t need them before, but now that we have them - and are used to them - we definitely do need them. We can’t do without them.

In the popular technology adoption curve, the problem and need doesn’t arise in the market until others start to have the product. Once others have a mobile phone or an email address, then it becomes a problem not to have one. Of course, how to get to that point is a whole other question tackled by people like Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm.

Early adopters are often not buying for need at all. They are buying for the same reason that the designer made the product - the desire to play with it, not the need.

[This blog has moved to here]