Something I was thinking about today while browsing kickstarter and saw this product —
I feel like the lifecycle of product lines kinda go like this:
- Someone creates a new product, something that genuinely solves a problem. This is the first iteration of the product.
- People use the product, like it, find more use cases, and desire more. Companies make improvements to the first iteration and expand to these niche cases. There’s two routes here:
- Some companies may really dive deep into a specific niche and create the second iteration meant to solve specific problems for a specific group of people
- Other companies may try to be “generalist” and cater to the wider audience by building many features atop the first iteration
- Specifically for the generalist case, the cycle of people wanting more features ←> companies building new iterations continue for a while
- Then, at some point, people decide that they want a stripped down version, something that basically does just what the first iteration did. This is usually under the guise of a “minimalist” version of the product.
This is so interesting to see and I feel like it happens all the time, in many different areas. Even though I linked a kickstarter above, this definitely is seen in software as well. Maybe the “minimalist” version, is actually a niche? Maybe it’s a next iteration? I’m not 100% sure, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for this cycle specifically for e-readers, which I feel like are in the cycle mentioned above. I’m sure that within a few years, we’ll have an e-reader that promises to just be a screen where you load pdfs into, without any connection to the internet for “lack of distraction.”