The Wiki Man | 18 July 2009

Henry Ford supposedly said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ This quotation is often used as an argument against relying on market research in the pursuit of innovation. Bill Gates voiced a similar thought to Ford’s when he suggested that ‘people don’t know how to want the things we can offer them’.

A glance at human behaviour makes it hard to argue against this approach. After all, most technology is what economists call an ‘experience good’ — something whose value only becomes apparent once people have tried it for themselves, like mobile telephony, Sky+ or, come to think of it, heroin. Less than 10 per cent of the population 20 years ago wanted a mobile phone, yet now there are very few who would hand theirs back.

All the same, I sometimes feel technologists could spend a little less time in blue-sky research and a little more time listening to what people say. It shouldn’t have taken 30 years of complaining before tomato ketchup became available in squeezable bottles.

This week, two much complained about problems finally neared a solution. The first good news came with an announcement that ten mobile handset manufacturers will standardise their phone-chargers from next year onwards. The second came from laptop maker Lenovo who announced that it is considering dropping the CapsLock key from future keyboards.

Praise the Lord! Every one of us, with our drawerful of redundant phone chargers and our emails inadvertently typed in capitals, could have told them to do this ages ago. The CapsLock button is now the keyboard equivalent of the human appendix — an item whose only remaining function is to cause pain. In the typewriter era, when you could not embolden text, there was a value to capitalisation.