Simplicity
Om Malik wrote today on the virtues of simplicity in technology. Do one thing and do it well, rather than trying to cram every possible feature into the gizmo. Too many features ultimately confuse consumers and lead to long-term dissatisfaction. Think iPod, the Palm V, the original Blackberry, and Google before they started having Google-this and Google-that.
In technology, two powerful forces conspire to make products more complex than they need to be. One is marketing, since feature-checklist marketing demands that as soon as any competitor adds a new feature (no matter how absurd), then you need to add it too.
The other force is Wall Street, which demands that technology companies post exponentially increasing revenue growth even when a company's core market nears saturation. The only way out is to expand into other markets by creating goofy hybrid products like camera-phones, MP3-player-phones, smart-phones, game-player-phones, and other hyphenated-phones (none of which are very good at being phones).
All of which makes me harken back to the last mobile phone I truly loved. It was a Nokia 8860, about the size of a matchbox with a slide-out keypad cover and a chrome finish. It was an excellent phone, even though it lacked a color screen, camera, downloadable ringtones, or Palm OS (but it did have some lo-res black-and-white games). I dialed a number and talked to people; alternately, people would dial my number and I could answer or not as I chose.
Today I carry a Treo 650, considered by many the best smartphone on the market. I do appreciate being able to sync my address book to my computer (a useful capability the Nokia lacked). In addition, the Treo will take really crappy pictures, play MP3 files I load onto it with considerable difficulty, play lo-res games (but in color!), and sometimes place or receive phone calls. The latter capability only works intermittently, since the phone has a habit of turning itself off, randomly rebooting, or sometimes just not working for unknown reasons.
Ah, but now I only need to carry one gizmo around instead of two! It is true that I'm more conscientious about using my Palm organizer now that it's also my phone. But a Treo is as big or bigger than a Nokia 8860 glued to a Palm V, and I still own both an iPod and a digital camera (the music player and camera features of the Treo being so indescribably awful as to be useless).
The difference is that instead of owning a highly functional and stylish phone, a highly functional and stylish organizer, and a highly stylish and functional music player, I merely own a highly functional and stylish music player and a clunky and marginally functional organizer/phone. But both the Nokia 8860 and the Palm V have long since been discontinued and are no longer supported in the U.S.
Now that's progress.