An Open Letter

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.