Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

The Practicality Gap

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 9th 2007 | Discuss
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Convergence has taken a long time, first being discussed in the mid eighties, due to over ambition, false starts, and insufficient technology. Kathleen Maher has looked at situations like this over the past twenty years and developed an insightful and helpful tool she calls the Practicality Gap.

Briefly Maher has discovered that all new products in the high-tech industry begin life as a promising new technology, and when that technology is introduced it can often be buoyed by unrealistic expectations. But let’s just say that this doesn’t have to be the result of exuberant marketing. Instead, we believe it’s reasonable to say that a lot of excitement around a new technology can be an indicator of its worth and potential use. We would not, however, say the reverse. We would not say that a new technology that receives a muted reception or even an indifferent reception is doomed. It may be misunderstood by the public and sometimes even by its inventors

In many cases the real problem for new technology, new ideas, or new products is not that they are too early in terms of acceptance by potential customers. What happens more often is that the innovation itself is not ready for mass consumption. What may be suitable for tinkerers and early adopters is not necessarily a fit product for the mainstream, and this is true for users who might be highly technical as well as consumers who don’t have any experience or interest in high-tech products or technologies.

We believe that technology introductions can be charted and predicted using this model. Very often the Practicality Gap is actually created by a lag in technology. The personal video recorder is a perfect example. The idea of a personal video recorder was introduced a decade ago by companies developing video codecs. They were not immediately successful because the first implementations were not fully developed products. DVR/PVR did not become a real product until it became incorporated into the distribution network via DirecTV. Finally, customers could just order the service instead of setting it up – that was when that category crossed the Practicality Gap.