Sometimes, good old fast-food eating Tam gets cooking – usually, its Arabic stuff or “heavy meat” which usually turns out very edible. When cooking some Arabic dish that needed garlic, I found these thingies in the kitchen(the WristPDA image is more-less proportional):
garlic1 When form doesn’t follow function or On being hip garlic2 When form doesn’t follow function or On being hip
Eek? Garlic sized the size of an onion? Obviously, the garlic looks cool and probably costs ten times as much as regular garlic(look at the tiny, fancy shipping package) – but is it really useful?

For me, it was hell on earth. Getting this garlic pressed was hell on earth. Cut up, press, cut up, press ad nausea. So, it obviously failed the usability test – lets look at how it could fare in the market.

If the product manages to become ‘cool’ or ‘hip’(Crazy Frog, some lifestyle junk); it obviously will sell like hell. But this “hip” calculation is very dangerous – for each product that manages to get hip, then die on the street. Binary Clock for Palm OS is such a product – it scores excellent reviews everywhere, but sales are below expectations.

For a company with foo(bigger than a few) successful products, taking this gamble is no real risk. The rest of the projects can pay for the costs of the misdevelopment easily… . However, for a small shack with a single product, taking this gamble is a bad idea 99% of the time…

What do you think?

Related posts:

  1. Customer misunderstandings are support mistakes
  2. On small nuissances-in accumulated form
  3. On public relations and corporate greed
  4. Binary Clock 4.1 released
  5. SrcEdit with faster Function Bookmark functionality