At the Voice 2.0 conference, I shamelessly played for audience sympathy by opening with a picture of my baby daughter. I said it was her 1st birthday, but I'd come to Ottawa instead. Why? The communications industry had never delivered me the working equivalent of the Fisher Price toy phone that would let me call my kids, or them call their grandparents or cousins. My younger one still believes the DVD remote is our primary communications device, and the sole use of the keypad on the cordless phone is to make nice tones that deafen grandma at the other end.
In other words, a high-margin WiFi phone is one that offers military-grade child-resistant controls and a couple of buttons which light up when some key contacts are around, and you sell in packs of two.
Here's another product I want, but nobody wants to sell me.
I hardly dare call home when away because my kids are erratic sleepers at best, and it's far too easy to get the timing wrong. I could text her mobile, BUT that makes a pointless beeping at inappropriate moments, or lurks in the going-out bag under nappies and "baby wipes" (the unspoken truth: "poo wipes").
I want a big LED display I can put on the wall, and send text messages to. And a row of buttons to acknowledge receipt and return an pre-canned SMS. "Yes", "No", "Maybe", "Yes, I still love you.", "If you're not home by 5.30 I'm going to murder them all by myself." And that's it.
So next time someone tries to pitch you another me-too USB Skype phone that does a bad copy of a deskphone at five times the price, tell them that the real deal is taking little slices of the experience of communications, and driving them into circumstances where the communications products can't yet reach. It's the Heineken strategy -- coverage and distribution always win. Not everyone spends their day tethered to a PC screen, or is big enough to even reach the keyboard.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 3:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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