Why Technologies Fail
It's not for market, or business reasons that technologies really fail. It's for more nuanced and complex than that.
The company had spent millions developing their new technology product. Convinced that people would take to it liked they’d taken to the iPod and the iPhone. The founders couldn’t wait to get out on the streets wearing them.On launch day the energy in the company was palpable. But within a week or so, the product had flopped. People hated it. It worked very well, perhaps too well.
That product was Google Glass. People wearing them were called “glassholes.” It wasn’t long before they were pulled from the market. Google Glasses have gone on to find some niche market success and AR glasses seem to slowly be creeping bak into the market.
There are likely, we can’t know for sure, more failed technologies than successful ones throughout history. There are many reasons a technology will fail, but there is always one main factor that decides whether a technology succeeds or fails. Culture.
In our modern capitalist societies, we tend to see products failing with this lens. And while that is a significant reason, it’s bigger than that and has more to do with culture and where a technology fits, or doesn’t, with societies and cultures.
Some technologies are successful in one culture, but not another. Some Inuit tribes in the arctic used snowshoes while others used kayaks. This was down to cultural norms and traditions who saw the technologies in different ways.
Technologies are often assigned meaning and purpose within a culture in the way it used. One example is the way truck drivers in India and Pakistan create incredibly lavish and intricate art work on their trucks and inside the cabins.
Even well designed technology products, like Google Glass or even Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player can fail to gain cultural traction. Technology companies call this product-market fit. Many do a fair bit of market research in the design phase and for marketing, but today, many technology companies don’t think about cultural fit. The ones that do, tend to have greater chances of success.
Sometimes a technology may be ahead of it’s time and the infrastructure needed for it to be successful may not quite be there. Boo.com was a fashion retailer that started in the later phase of the .com boom in 1998 and shuttered in 200. It was a superb product, but most internet use was via dial-up, high-speed was costly and hard to get. In addition society was still wary about paying for things online and online shopping just wasn’t there.
For technologies to be culturally accepted, they have to not just work, not just solve a problem, they also need to work within societal norms, customs and traditions. The more a technology can check off these boxes, the more successful it will be. Printed books, television, telephones and of course the internet, check a whole lot of boxes.
Sociocultural rejection of a technology can have a role too, especially if society sees a threat from the technology. This was so with the railroad, wool mills, and today, Artificial Intelligence. Even electricity was feared. Over time, as people saw the benefits, these technologies succeed.
Some technologies too, are transitional. They’re good for a period of time until the next innovation comes along. The iPod became obsolete when the iPhone did the same thing and made phone calls.
There are those too, who believe they can knock a dominant technology off its pedestal and become a huge success, only to fail. A prime example is the communication platform Slack. They boldly stated it meant the death of email. But email is so culturally embedded around the world, Slack didn’t replace it. Email it seems, just isn’t ready to die.
A technology often changes a culture, as I’ve written about before in the three phases of awareness, evaluation and then adoption, which is when culture then changes the technology. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are in the awareness phase. If AI does become useful and seen perhaps as a general purpose technology, then it will succeed.
Technologies evolve through what is called in anthropology, the Ratchet Effect, a cultural means of building on other cultural elements. With technology it’s adding and improving the original technology.
Contrary to the popular belief that a technology has to be commercially successful in a market, that’s only one small factor. Cultural factors such as norms, behaviours, customs and traditions and societal beliefs are the primary influencers on the success of a technology. As I often say, culture is the ultimate arbiter of technology.