Transcripts

Pip Coburn:
The technologies that are adopted are those where there's some level of crisis that is higher than the total perceived pain of adopting the solution.

Pip Coburn, author of the book The Change Function, says for example the pain of learning to use and lugging around a cell phone is worth it because of the need it fills - which is freedom. An example of a technology Pip doesn't think will work is the tablet PC.

That Bill Gates has touted and maybe a lot of you have known about. So, Bill Gates said, "People want to be able to write on their PC's." We've transferred our society to be very keyboard - centric over the last twenty-five years and I don't think people really frankly want to go back. So, there's a faulty premise inside of his pushing the tablet PC - that in fact people want to write on their computer screens. There's a huge pain of adoption to understand how to go about even doing it.

An example of a slam-dunk technology, says Pip, is flat panel televisions.

Which were at about 15% penetration inside North America - but the beautiful thing I like about this Mike, is you don't have to learn anything to buy this product. Everyone knows what a television is, that's a wonderful thing. We're already at that 15%- we're starting to get to that point where there's a crisis of peer pressures building in and I think that it's going to take off like a rocket as we go to the back of this year.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.