The Failure of the Pure Product
I was just re-reading a terrific article about the hundred dollar laptop, or XO as it is now called. It was written by a Kenyan named Binyavanga Wainaina and it views the XO from an African perspective, taken in context with all of the other transformative technology invented by Americans and Europeans for Africans over the years. It’s a great read, full of insights and criticism that are not the kind you normally read about new technologies.
One of the points Wainaina makes is about what he calls “pure products” like the XO, and how they often fail in their noble aims:
These pure products are meant to solve everything.
They almost always fail, but they satisfy the giver. To the recipients, the things have no context, no relationship to their ideas of themselves or their possibilities. A great salesman can spark a dialogue with you; in a matter of minutes, you come to make your own sense of his product, fitting it into your imagination, your life. You lead, the salesman follows. Whereas a pure product presents itself as a complete solution; a product built to serve the needs of the needy assumes the needy have measured themselves exactly as the product has measured them.
Later, he says:
For all of the products that have successfully entered our national imagination, the items themselves were probably less important than the process. Success was less a function of satisfying a need than of creating new needs, new demands; it was the way they made you feel about yourself, for good or ill, that made them work.
I think about this a lot in the context of coming up with new ideas for outside.in, as well as other projects I work on. It’s very easy to approach creation/development in a ‘pure product’ frame of mind - develop the thing that is going to perfectly solve your audience’s needs, as you’ve imagined them to be. It’s tougher to hold off from doing this, and instead create something that lets people fit your product into their imagination of themselves.
The full text of the article is on the right-hand side of this page.
