Lesson 3/Week 6: Invent on Behalf of the Customer

One of the questions for this week’s learning blog was to consider products that have become obsolete.  Products are tools that provide consumer benefits, and if a better tool comes along that provides the same core benefit but is easier to get, cheaper, or more fun, the old tool will be obsolete.  I went searching for examples, and found a link with some of the biggest ones over the last 10-15 years. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/21-things-that-became-obsolete-this-decade-2009-12?op=1

The first one on the list was the one that immediately came to my mind:  The PDA.  I remember I was issued one of these at Officer Candidate School in the Navy in 2000.  I though my Palm was the greatest thing ever.  Of course, it became completely obsolete when Blackberry allowed calendars, phone calls, messaging, email, notes, etc., all in a single product.  Then the touch-screen smartphone killed it.  Palm tried to get into the smartphone market, but they were too far behind.  I believe they were bought by HP and then discontinued.

The next one was E-Mail accounts you had to pay for.  My first interaction with email was through school in the late 90’s, so college students by and large had free access early on.  But America Online was selling it as part of their service, which got killed by Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail.

There are lots of other great examples, like video rental stores supplanted by Netflix/RedBox, dial-up internet replaced by DSL/Cable broadband, Maps (I still have a few stuffed in the side pocket of my car though), VCR’s, and long-distance charges (killed by Skype, VoIP, and cell phones). 

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when executives were trying to decide what to do after becoming aware of all of the threats posed to these now obsolete products.  How much marketing myopia was going on?