Predicting Radical Innovation – iPhone isn’t picture perfect

Can we ever really know if an invention is going to stick? Can we tell if a technology will revolutionize our lives, or will be relegated to the back of the closet next to 8 track tapes?

Its an academic question professors puzzle. And we have plenty of tools in the prognostication shed to make the task easier. Surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews. All of those are geared toward predicting whether an innovation will catch on. This month my iPhone as taught me the inadequacies of these methods. Why? Because you never know until you try.

Yep, I got an iPhone. I know, I know. I blogged just a few months ago that in the feature contest the scale tipped toward my Nokia N95. So why did I buy an iPhone? Email. The N95 did many things well. But not email – at least not well. I spend every Thursday in the ATL visiting with companies. Email is the way that people count on getting to me so being away from my email for a 6-hour stretch has been killing me. I needed a way to at least check for crises from afar. I had bought my son, Scoop, an iPhone and the longer that I watched him banging out emails in the backseat of the car, at the lake, everywhere, I knew I had to have one. So I bit the bullet and bought the iPhone.

Now I went in with both eyes open. I had already compared the iPhone with the N95. And one of the main features that I knew the features my migration to the iPhone would cost me was the high quality camera. My N95 has a 5 megapixel camera, auto-focus, and even a flash. Plus it had a true camera interface – by that I mean you hold it like a real camera and shoot pictures like a real camera. You slide open the lens cover and the camera is ready to use – no extra button pushing. The N95 has an easy to use memory card. And perhaps best of all, I could easily download my pictures from my N95 to any computer with BlueTooth capability – and that is pretty much any Apple. No cables, no special apps. It just went. The pictures were great and the process was easy.

The iPhone is different. It has a 2 megapixel camera, no flash. It doesn’t work like a camera – no real shutter release and no real viewfinder. Getting ready to take a picture with the iPhone camera requires unlocking the phone, selecting the camera app, and waiting. That kind of gets in the way of a quick snapshot. The iPhone has BlueTooth, but it is only for a hands-free earplug. It’s hard to imagine why a company that has embraced full-featured BlueTooth in its other product lines would limit it on the iPhone. And worst of all, I could only download my photos onto the computer that I use to sync my iPhone and I have to do it through iPhoto. A real pain because I want to download pictures on my home AND office computer.

Way back in 2003 when I first saw a camera in a phone. I said it was stupid. I claimed that the only reason they put a camera in a phone is because they could but a camera in a phone. There was no compelling reason for it. No consumers were clamoring for it. I had never once daydreamed about a phone that was also a camera. And since the first cameraphones I saw were at an industry trade show in New Orleans most of the pictures I saw taken were accompanied by the exchange of beads. That led me to opine that only bad things could come of cameraphones.

So as I powered down the N95 and powered up the iPhone, I tried to console myself that I didn’t really need a true camera in my phone. I had lived most of my life without one, I would be ok.

Only, I am not OK. Unknowingly, access to that camera in a phone my behavior. I did things differently because I had the camera. No longer were there situations where I wished I had a camera – I always had a camera. And I started thinking differently about the world around me. For instance, on my way back from Atlanta, I saw one of those cell towers they camouflage as a tree and I snapped photo for a class lecture on frequency allocation and cell density – without even stopping the car. Any visitor that came to campus, I took a picture of them ringing the Chapel bell – and I sent it to them as soon as I got to my office. That always made an impression. My youngest son is a shoe freak and he has been looking for some Air Jordan Retro – incredibly hard to find. I took a picture of his friend’s pair and I keep looking for those shoes wherever I travel.

Without knowing it, capturing images became a routine act. Something that was second nature. Something I expected to be able to do without any preparation or extra effort. I love the email on the iPhone, but I miss the images that came with my N95. And I might be the first person in the world to actually go back to the phone they had before the iPhone.

My issues with the iPhone have taught me something very important. We will always have limited success in gauging the user acceptance of a radical innovation. What we think we will do in the future is always conditioned by what we have done in the past. I had never had a camera in my phone before so I couldn’t imagine needing one. However, when I was equipped for image capture with my cameraphone, I developed a set of behavior and practices that utilized that capability. I didn’t need it before it was there, but soon after it was there I needed it.

Things are changing so quickly. We have so many capabilities to do things we hadn’t even contemplated. So adoption of radical innovation is something that will always be very difficult to predict. We never really know whether someone WILL do something until they CAN do it. Maybe Alan Kay, one of the first computer pioneers said, was right when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”