I had lunch yesterday with someone who was a recent transplant to NY from the valley. They commented on what a great thing it was to finally ditch their car for getting around as it’s a bit of a hindrance to own a car in Manhattan. I thought about this for a while afterward, mostly remembering the few years I lived in NY in the later 80′s when I owned a car and kept it in NY. I never drove it anywhere for fear of losing the most sacred of things in NY, my parking space. As a result, it mostly sat unused except to move it from one side of the street to the other, twice a week. (I initially had dreamed of just garaging it until I discovered that for the same money, I could have gotten it two bedrooms and a bath in a nice area in NJ). The key was, I had the *potential* of using it anytime I wanted, even though I rarely did.
Likewise, I live in the NJ suburbs, no more than 15 mins from Manhattan without traffic. Ask me why, and I’ll tell you it’s to have the advantages of the suburbs but still be close to the great museums, theater and culture of NY. Of course you might want to ask me when the last time I went to one of the great Museums or the theater was. There’s an aspirational theme associated with all this. Not what I do, but what I could do.
And that brings me to the point of this post. Technology should be aspirational as well, especially when sold to consumers. There’s a real lack of that today for the most part. Yes, Apple does this better than most but for the most part no one else even tries. The latest MSFT ads for Windows Photo Gallery are great but it’s hard to call stuff done by a four year old as aspirational.
In day’s gone by, PCs were sold with a programming language, the notion being you could use this tool to create great things. Later, it was HyperCard with Macintosh. Today, the most that folks aspire to is to create playlists of their favorite songs or lightly edit a photo. Even Apple, focuses mostly on media content creation with iLife with all of their PCs, (Hypercard itself is sadly more.) Surely there’s more we can do with technology and these tools?
I’ve often argued that consumers consume content and don’t create it, that’s why they’re called consumers. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t strive to create products that fire the imagination and spark creativity. Many may never care, others may aspire to the goal and in the end, never take advantage of the power to create and others may come up with the next big idea. Aspiration is good even if potential is never totally unleashed.
As the poet Robert Browning said, “A man’s reach should exeed his grasp, or else what’s a heaven for?”
Posted by Gartenberg 
