David Emery Online

Spade

20 November 2007

One thing I’ve noticed recently is an increasing trend of ignoring the obvious. Focusing on the nuts and bolts of things is easy – the numbers, the statistics, the things you can quantify – but frequently misses the point entirely.

Yesterday’s Amazon Kindle announcement is a perfect case in point. I’ve seen a huge amount of all different kinds of discussion, nicely summed up by this line by John Gruber:

“I say the difference is that the iPod allowed you to easily play the music you already owned, and that you could (and can to this day) buy music to play on iPods in an open format.”

The reason that Amazon Kindle will fail (and I’m pretty certain of it now I’ve seen videos of it in action) is that the hardware is terrible. It’s really pretty simple. No amount of looking at the specifications, weighing up the pricing models and looking at the potential competitors will transcend the fundamental fact that Kindle – as a physical object – is appalling, from its low-rent design to its not-ready-yet e-ink screen that requires a strange separate scroll-bar because it can’t refresh quickly.

Sometimes the flaw can be so glaringly obvious that it’s almost as though all the other features bend around to obscure it. A good case in point would be all the digital music retailers – like Napster, and assorted other now-dead stores – that based their service on Windows Media DRM. Windows Media DRM – fairly obviously – doesn’t work on iPods, the most popular audio player, so why would anyone want to buy tracks that would never play on them? Of course, that didn’t stop lots of companies wading in and having a go, spending lots of money and utterly falling on their arse.

I bet you can see examples of missing the obvious every day, in every different job. Certainly in the music industry there’s a rich history in ignoring the key points and ploughing on regardless. Is the artist lazy and work shy? Then they’re not going to do well, as doing well takes more work then you could possibly imagine. Is the album actually, you know, good? I’m not sure if that seems to be a question that gets asked much, but it takes a lot of effort to ask hard questions.

Call a spade a spade.

Call a turkey a turkey.