Research that would be of crucial importance to a tech company

Here are a few opinions that I have expressed in my blog. I can't really back up my words because I don't know if market research has been done that supports me (or even if some have been done, the result would be highly valuable information to the company and there's no reason they would tell me.)

1. One flaw = fiasco.

I have observed that the level of usability and performance of operating systems or even further, of many kinds of technology products has reached at a place where it is very hard for an averagely informed customer to understand the difference or to perceive gradually some deep down internal improvement. That's what intelligent reviews should help people do but because of various reasons, I doubt if reviews help or confuse more.

I was mentioning operating systems as an example here. To the contrary of the difficulty in perceiving inner improvements (such as most people won't understand how a hard drive based MP3 player is different from a RAM one, as long as they both store the music and it is really not something to worry about from a user experience point of view), flaws are easily discovered and people will try their best to avoid them. I mean, above all, there are so many (even though) average performing non-flawed products out there, who wants to go through all the trouble to get it fixed or something which counts as both extra monetary cost and time cost.

An interesting psychological study could be done to see people's forbearance of flaw over improvement. I suspect it requires a huge defeat on one aspect to compensate for one little flaw on another. And in most circumstances, I guess it's not so smart to risk it.

Then, even though seemingly not ideal, but even in the technology market, company should rationally be quite conservative about their products unless they plan to serve the few.

2. User configurability.

Configurability isn't really a word. But I think some attention again is again diverged away from technological design. When you go to buy a calculator for daily use, you won't probably buy a TI 83+ but instead a scientific or simple digital calculator. I would do that and I think it's reasonable. What do people do with computers, getting their work done. So the one that does it the best is the choice. I should have used some if and only if structure. I mean you don't probably want your TV to also toast your bread so when you use a computer for some daily work, it is not like that you have to be able to do these fast/smart system configurations or come up with these efficient one-liners. So you really just want to lift your finger lightly and get the work smoothly done.

There's a trade off between power and simplicity, relatively, although it would be really great to have both. But at the present stage, I think operating systems have enabled enough control or power for most daily use and I think companies should start to diversify their products. Ones that are for cool hunting, fun loving tech people and ones that are simple, stable, solid for daily use, like I primitively proposed here.

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