Revealed: Why Everything Is Getting So Cruddy

David Schatsky | April 21, 2008, 07:18 PM

Did you ever stop to wonder why everything is getting so cruddy? Look at the experiences that have been transformed by digital technology in the last 10 years and you will find experiences that have been diminished—at least according to the criteria traditionally used to assess those experiences.

Take telephony. Reliability used to be the touchstone of the phone system. It was the telecom guys who invented the notion of “five nines” reliability. Ma Bell’s network was rock solid. Today, the phone systems that most people use, much of the time, are laughably unreliable, and of lower audio quality too. People have come to expect spotty cell phone coverage, dropped calls and background noise. The strange digital effects introduced in VoIP telephony are increasingly in evidence as people trade traditional phone service for cheaper, more flexible alternatives.

Or take recorded music. Recorded music technology used to be judged by one criterion above all: fidelity. (Hence the term hi-fi.) But in the move from vinyl to CD to MP3, sound quality has been sacrificed in favor of a variety of other benefits, including the fact that digital recordings can often be obtained for free, and MP3 players can be worn as jewelry. (An article in the NYT discusses this phenomenon.) Much as audio purists maintain that vinyl records produce richer, realer sound than digital alternatives, some even maintain that tube amplifiers produce better sound than those built from transistors. But those purists are increasingly seen as irrelevant--by the makers of audio equipment and by the music industry too.

The Web gave rise to the “thin client,” with its user experience that was positively impoverished compared to the “thick client” experience made popular by rich, client-based software interacting with one or more server tiers on the back end. While browser-based applications offer much better experiences today than their forebears 5 years ago, even then, the browser set off a mad dash to replace rich, high-quality user experiences with thin, cruddy browser-based ones, because thin-client economics were better.

The Web has also created serious competition in the media industry, nowhere more evident than in the news and information sector. Here, digital technology offers quick, free, real-time but often sloppy, ugly and inaccurate alternatives to traditional media, where accuracy and transparency used to rank high among the values. And the junk has found a huge audience, and its influence is so powerful that the traditional media is a work copying its tactics and co-opting its ethos.

What is going on here? It’s not that everything is going to hell in a hand basket. (Or not just that.) It’s that in all of these areas—and others—digital technology has allowed a rebalancing of tradeoffs. Quality, reliability, accuracy--meet ubiquity, scalability, extreme convenience, democratization, openness and personalization. Masses of consumers mobilized at a speed never seen in the pre-digital era, are demonstrating that they expect a new system of values and tradeoffs expressed in their products, services and experiences.

Some of the examples I’ve cited above bring to mind Clayton Christensen’s influential book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which documented how disruptive technologies often appear inferior to the incumbent technologies they ultimately come to supplant. That is because often “products that do not appear to be useful to our customers today … may squarely address their needs tomorrow.”

But it feels like more is going on here. It feels like the very definitions of “useful” and “needs” are up for grabs in ways that the creators of the earlier generations of consumer services and technologies could not have anticipated.

Where will this all lead? I’m not sure yet. But we’ll be talking about it in the halls of JupiterResearch. And we’ll be happy to talk to you about it too.