This is an open letter to visualizer manufacturers
everywhere. I hope you are listening.
Your product—the classroom document camera—is a
wonderful tool. We simply can’t live without it in a classroom. Many IT folks
and administrators despise document cameras, but teachers love them.
But one of my pet peeves is something I that have seen both commoditize and degrade the digital camera market and other AV-product
markets over the years. In an effort to stay relevant—to keep one step ahead of
your competition—companies strive to constantly improve their products. There’s nothing
wrong with that, I suppose. Or is there?
See it from our point of view. Features constantly changing. Overly rapid feature
creep. Every six to twelve months. Perhaps a perceived advantage for your
product over your competitors, but for schools it’s just frustrating. Schools
feel the unwelcome ogle of forced obsolescence gawking over their shoulders. If
the changes are too frequent, it’s enough to make them want to wait. Or enough
to make them bemoan their past purchases and give up on future or replacement
purchases.
The bottom line is that feature creep forces your
marketing to focus on small gains, the trivial advantages over your
competitors. What about featuring great teaching in your literature or booths?
What about shouting the message of visual teaching and learning strategies? Why
not emphasize the effectiveness of brain-based teaching, which really works?
My advice is this: slow your product improvement
cycle down to two years, like other successful technology industries; create a
sense of industry stability, making each new product announcement worth its
weight in gold; and start talking less about features and more about what
really matters—powerful visual teaching.
