Early Adopters

Do you consider yourself to be an early adopter? Do you salivate when you dream about adding a media PC to your A/V system in the family room that the rest of you family already can’t operate? Did you spend last summer crawling in the attic and under the house to run high-speed ethernet wiring all over your house so you can automate everything under the sun? If so, then my hat’s off to you. You’re a pioneer, a visionary, a true geek. (fyi, a geek is different from a nerd in that he/she doesn’t wear a pocket protector).

However, if like me, you resist the urge to replace your PC every year or pay through the nose to have the latest new gadget, you are among the majority of people who marketeers call late adopters. These are people who tend to be more conservative in their buying habits and prefer to wait and see if this new fangled Tivo thingy is really something they need, and if it turns out they want it, they derive satisfaction out of having waited until it drops in price by 50%. These people comprise the vast majority of consumers, like 80%.

If you fall into the 20% group, you are indeed a strange breed. You love technology so much that you are willing to put up with poorly written instructions, flawed ergonomics, pre-release software, and little or no technical support just for the satisfaction of being on the cutting edge. You are so into high tech that you don’t seem to mind spending hours upon hours trying to program your new remote control or fancy security system, as long as it does something cool that you couldn’t do before. You are all about empowerment and owning tools that expand your leverage over your life.

Having said that, I must admit that I occasionallywake up and find myself in bed with the above group of geeks (figuratively speaking!!). I have always been a collector of tools; and I’m not just talking hammers and electric screwdrivers. I broaden the definition to anything that makes me feel more powerful, more in control. I know what you’re thinking, that I’m suffering from some sort of insecurity complex or it’s a macho thing; but we’re talking about a basic human need here: the need to feel in control of your environment. I freely admit that I am fascinated with technology and sometimes get need and desire mixed up.

Of course, I don’t regularly succumb to the desire to have the newest and coolest thing because as I get older my frustration threshold seems to have dropped a bit. I find myself more willing to wait for the vastly improved version 2 and I also don’t particularly like paying through the nose to help a company complete their product development.

Consequently, as I read these tech articles I find myself chuckling at the things that the innovators (very early adopters) seem to believe. Example: I just read one in Electronic House about archiving your video collection that starts out: “while most of us have computers with DVD burners in them...” This the first clue about which part of the continuum this guy is in. He goes on to explain how cool it is to have a DVD burner that needs no computer; a burner that you can set up in the kitchen and hook to your VCR to copy a movie while you’re making toast. What is this guy smoking? Probably his toast as he tries to monitor his file transfer while making breakfast. You probably ask (along with me) why is this capability worth an extra $400 to have in the kitchen? Why do people talk themselves into thinking that they “need” this kind of thing?

While I accept that articles in these kinds of publications are clearly aimed at a narrow audience of early adopters, it still makes me laugh that they are so serious about the benefits of being able to control every part of their electronic environment from every room in the house. I envision this guy with a wireless PDA strapped to his belt just itching for a member of his family to present him with a new challenge: “Dad, please tell the lawnmower robot to stay in his little charging garage this afternoon, I’m having some friends over” or “Dear, can you please show me how to play a movie on all 8 LCD screens in the house at the same time. I don’t want to have to sit in one place to watch my movie.”

Granted this is an extreme case that only applies to people with too much money on their hands, but the true early adopters that make up no more than 20% of consumers really do us a service. Even though they are clearly not as hard to please as the rest of us, they do drive the technology and they help to get the refinement process going so the rest of the population doesn’t have to suffer with so much bad design. For people like me who appreciate well thought out controls and eschew silly gadgets that nobody really needs, it is a good thing that we have these folks to run interference for us, and provide a proving ground for all the innovative designers in the world.