Saturation or Sense?

Kristina B — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:47:00 -0500

I just read a good summary of the general message at SXSW Interactive (which echoed my own summary):

If there was one overarching message at this year’s conference, I think it was this: Businesses or services have customers, clients and/or users. And those are people. Human beings. The way of speaking to and otherwise communicating with those people is changing. The press release is boring. People would much rather read a blog. Corporate-speak is a thing of the past. There are ways to stay professional and better engage customers. Because no one is passionate or really excited about a company that they don’t relate to. The key is passionate users. With so many options for consuming services, it is key to incite passion in customers, clients and users. They should be proud to “buy your t-shirt”—believe in your culture, message and persona. It is the experience that sells. It is the experience that differentiates.

It’s that last sentence along with a question that we heard during the Fried / Coudal keynote that’s got me thinking.

The question was basically: how many subscription-based web apps will one person sign up to before it’s just too much to think about?

Fried suggested that even if this new movement means a single person is signing up to ten $10/month (highly specific, simple, elegant) services, he himself would pay that $100 a month to get tools that are useful and compelling.

Sure, that might make sense. We consumers pay monthly for services all the time: cell phone, land-line, cable, broadband, magazine and newspaper subscriptions etc.. It does seem that the web is moving that way too – rather than buying a box from a store with bloated software in it and buying the update a year later, the software landscape is turning into a more dynamic, web-based service style business.

This change in focus is valuable for everyone involved, especially consumers. There’s no denying that. However, people only have so much passion to go around. Passion is an extreme emotion, and if people ended up passionate about every product or service that they use they’d get burnt out. Similarly, building community is great, but there are only so many communities that one can be a part of. If you’re an avid Flickr user, and let’s say you’re also on Friendster or MySpace or something like that, plus you keep a blog and read others’ blogs… when does it end?

More likely, people will never reach that saturation point. A few great services and products will rise to the surface, and the rest will die away.

On the other hand, it’s not like one day all the products that to need to exist will exist, and then we can all go home. Although there may be some limit to the number of products or services that a single person will pay for and get excited about, there are almost an infinite number of groups and subgroups of people with different needs and interests. So, we’ll probably see a trend toward highly focused applications that cater to very narrow market segments.

Handwriting: Saturation or Sense?

Saturation or Sense?