Golden Oldies: Entrepreneurs: Convenience is Killing Creativity
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Good, bad or silly, ideas for products are generated in response to a problem or need. It doesn’t matter if the problem/need only exists in the entrepreneur’s mind (think Jucerio), it’s still the driving force behind creating whatever. So what happens when there are no perceived problems? When the current whatever is treated as THE solution? Innovation takes a nosedive and monopolies thrive.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it’s for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.
Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious of, although I wasn’t sure why.
However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.
Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for — although I see no reason they need to be smart .
However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.
I search using startpage.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.
I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.
I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.
Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).
Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.
Image credit: jim212jim
