User Experience is Everything
We used to be obsessed about user experience at Yahoo! in the old days. We had the same attitude at Blurb, and still have. Great user experience is everything. It used to be called putting the customer in the center, being client oriented et cetera but these all miss the mark if you’re not obsessed about your consumer.
My Time Capsule (TC) died this week and I lost about 500GB of music, movies, TV-shows and applications. You mig argue that I should have had backup on my media server but I didn’t. So I emailed Apple about the precarious situation and they replaced the TC and gave me access to the 785 media files I’ve downloaded over the past few years - for free. That makes Apple not just a hardware and a software company but a services company. It makes them awesome.
Zappos has also figured out that they are in the service industry, offering two-way shipping. I feel the same about United Airlines, being an elite member. Las Ventanas resort in Mexico is in the same league, going the extra mile to deliver superior experience. Farm Fresh to You is another example with delivered organic food that blows me away every time I open the box.
The future belongs to these kind of companies that are obsessed about delivering an amazing user experience - not ownership or accessibility but real user experience. As a consumer you should not settle with anything less.
Research suggests that apples may reduce the risk of colon cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer. Compared to many other fruits and vegetables, apples contain relatively low amounts of Vitamin C, but are a rich source of other antioxidant compounds. The fiber content, while less than in most other fruits, helps regulate bowel movements and may thus reduce the risk of colon cancer. They may also help with heart disease, weight loss, and controlling cholesterol, as they do not have any cholesterol, have fiber, which reduces cholesterol by preventing reabsorption, and are bulky for their caloric content like most fruits and vegetables.
“What if I all my media could be digital?”
My thought in the end of 1999 as I had entered my second year working for Yahoo!. I created this long wish-list of things that I wanted to do with all my media, and low and behold, 10 years later it has all come true:
- One central repository for all my music and movies (via iTunes Library)
- Accessible via desktop, mobile and the Internet (WiFi, iPhone and WAN)
- Streaming music and movies on-demand (Spotify and Hulu)
- Downloadable rentals movies (iTunes)
There are still a number of flaws such as lack of real real-time streaming, using proxy server to use Spotify and only being able to have one iTunes app open at a time (if not using Home Sharing).
Since this wishing thing seem to be working here are a few more for the upcoming years:
- Having all the music I *own* in the cloud - for free
- Having access to streaming music and movies from around the world (getting tired of the blockbusters)
Apple will most likely introduce music streaming thanks to their acquisition of lulu. Legally getting access to *foreign* news, shows and movies is much harder as the world is already divided into regions, strongly guarded by old media.
I’m getting ready to give away my DVD and CD collection!
