Settling For Less

About 12 years ago I started work as a voice communications specialist in an IT department of a casino. Attached to the casino was a hotel, and I looked after the voice network in both. The people in the hotel expected crystal clear reception on their analogue phone sets*.

Throughout the rest of the casino phones were on a digital network, and again the expectation was that the phone reception would be crystal clear.

Two years later when I went to do the same job at IBM there was a change in expectations as to quality. You see the flakiness of mobile phones, with the drop outs, terrible reception, and interference from outside noise mean that people put up with less quality voice for the convenience of being able to take calls wherever, whenever. Along comes VoIP or IP Telephony and no one batted an eyelid when the desk phone call quality of service also dropped. They had been conditioned to accept that voice calls were no longer perfect.

In the space of 10 years the expectations of 100 years of telephone experience and expectations were completely wiped out.

Now we all hope that voice quality and reliability will bounce back, and it most definitely will. Until the next thing comes along to advance the science/technology, but create teething problems along the way.

I see the same thing happening with various old-school pockets of expectations on the internet. Journalistic integrity and quality, marketing and advertising efforts, social media engagement of b2c and b2b. Nothing starts out perfect, and as we go forward we do have to settle for less as part of the process of innovation. So when you see the dreaded Beta on an application or you are developing and bringing to market something new, forgive yourself of the thing is not perfect, or if the customer loses something along the way. Sometimes that is necessary. Humans are adaptable creatures that can handle a certain amount of rough edges to get a bright shiny new thing.

*  if you have ever wondered why they put phones next to the toilet in hotel rooms, it is for safety reasons. Lots of people have slips and falls in bathrooms. Unfortunately those slips and falls also happened to the handsets and many is the time I had to fish them out of the toilet.