In economics there are all sorts of paradoxical and counter-intuitive situations. One such example is Giffen goods, where demand increases with price.
Telecom has a few interesting paradoxes too. Adam Thierer is busy trying to balance his libertarian outlook on technology with his parental instinct to track and trace his kids. In doing so, he reveals one such paradox. If you can trace your kids at any time, it has negative value for the teenage holder of the mobile phone. He recounts Sprint's service, which at least lets the tracked teen know when they've been pinged; there's a social cost to the tracker.
But imagine if it cost $50 to do a track (and the teen also knows they're pinged). This could, in fact, prove to be of positive net value to the lost teen. "I'm so concerned about your whereabouts that I'm ready to drop $50 just to know where you are." The higher the price, the greater the value you are placing on your offspring's privacy. (It's not a Giffen good, though, in case you're wondering... there's a close substitute good of calling and asking 'where are you!?', and the gain to the teen is outweighed by the loss to the parent.)
Another example of this is the privacy value proposition of SMS, which I vaguely remember mentioning before. You know that the message is always terminated on a private mobile device. If you allowed SMS messages to be received on interactive TV, this would destroy the privacy value proposition of SMS, because you could no longer be assured the message won't be displayed to the whole family and any visitors. The additional distribution value isn't big enough to outweight the privacy loss.
In the same way, universal integrated messaging has been a consistent flop, because it pierces the privacy walls that users erect between different services -- kind of manual avatars, in that you use SMS for one set of friends, IM for others, email for work colleagues, voicemail for clients, and so on.
The users will always take your product and adapt it to their needs. It takes some close observation to understand what they really perceive as value.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 9:00 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/697