Looking for examples of products developed WITHOUT the customer in mind...
 

I was discussing the problem with companies that don't consider customer input as a valuable means to develop product. You guys have any examples?
I was comparing the Intel micro processors to Sun micro Systems or Lynx to OSx...

Ideas?

Modern Mini Cooper

Ever tried to use one?
Took me two years to figure out how to make intermittent wipers work, and had to go three levels deep in the menu to find change the speed

...keeping enough room on your credit card to keep the car serviced and functioning is another matter

MS Windows :)

Audi B5s...

Redbull

Porsche 911 air cooled dashboard ergonomics

Honda DN-01

For many years Mercedes built the car they wanted. If you liked it or not. They resisted A LOT putting in cup holders. When they started loosing market share because the Japanese had cup holders Mercedes did a Homer Simpson Doh! And started to listen to customers. Those crazy Americans were serious about cup holders.

BMW's iDrive

'08 Acura TL came with a cassette player and no jack for digital devices

The company I work for - a lot of our early products were developed from our own needs - and if we needed it - others needed it to.

We do however, take as much info as possible on how to meet other's needs in the industry. Quite a few of our products our from customers coming to us with a need.

At this point, there really isn't anything that we make anymore that fits the bill. The first product has been changed and enlarged to fit both 2" tube and 2" pipe - as a lot of people don't realize there is a difference.

I could name an enterprise IP telephony contact center product I deal with daily.

Reminds me of the product above. Not the coke.

+1

Beat me to it.

Though, I must say, the nav system in the Lexus RX400h had (has?) a frikkin' mouse to control things.

Idiotic.

Photoshop

Looking for examples of products developed WITHOUT the customer in mind...
 

iTunes.

Any government bureaucracy.

Ribbed for her pleasure? I don't think so.

Government.

Obamacare

Fat Man and Little Boy.

Mint flavored hemmoroid cream.

+a million

I will never touch Windows 8 if I can help it.
I don't like a lot of things about Win7, either. I hate that they hide things multiple layers deep in order to change settings that used to be obvious in WinXP.

Maybe not on the receiving end but definitely a plus for the senders.

My vote goes to SAP.

That stuff's mint-flavored? :confused:

Sure. For the taste buds in your ass...

Porsche 944

Every American car made between 1974 and 1984.

Porsche 911 AC/Heat/Defrost controls.

Cable TV

Computers. The retail, non-business market didn't enter the equation in the development stage. The first computer I tried to use was an impossible mish-mash..

Internet. The retail....

Aircraft. Flight was mystery, no customer in mind.

GPS. Who knew? The retail...

My Ford Touch

Would you accept things discovered through error, like the glue on postit notes and Lexan?

Mike,
Twenty years ago, the dairy I worked for decided to branch out and try to make milk a demand product rather than a commodity.
We had already tried flavored milk (with Warner Bros characters on the packaging, no less) but the marketing guys figured the market was ready for fortified milk, with added calcium and lower fat levels. (This in a market of <1 million people).
To differentiate the new product on the shelves, the packaging had to stand out (they felt) so a different color pallet was explored. Thus, at the sales managers/Depot Managers' meeting, they rolled out the Green cartons and the purple cartons. Green? Purple?
My comment, I'm afraid, was not constructive. The words that came out of my mouth were, "What were we thinking?"
I was later taken aside by my boss who said (in his Jimmy Stewart drawl), "Les, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
I knew my days with the dairy were on the downhill. The products bombed because
a/ they had no shelf appeal and
b/ not enough people in a small population were interested.
I was 'downsized' ten years later
The company was swallowed up last year.

You ignore what the customer wants at your peril.
Les

Re: modern Mini Cooper - I've had two of them and like them a lot. Obviously.

Re: BMW's iDrive: Works fine for us, though I will admit the learning curve is a bit steep. But once you figure it out, it makes a lot of sense.

Re: Mercedes "making the car they wanted to make." They made the car Germans wanted to buy, though for sure the US was a primary market. The lack of cupholders derived directly from their belief that when in a car, one drives. One does not eat and drink. That said, I kind of like cupholders.

Man, you got that right!

ORACLE is the same way :confused:

A friend of mine just bout a $42,000 lexus. Lovely car but...

The owners manual is almost 1,000 pages long. At some point, why not give up and put it in an electronic and searchable format...

The cruise control will not work going down hill. It will not reduce speed at all, no engine or transmission braking, etc. Set your cruise and you're fine on flat ground and uphill, but downhill you will be applying your brakes. Her old Lexus had typical cruise, the new very expensive car does not.

Most consumer products - the wretched hard clear plastic packaging that you need a sawzall to cut through and chain mail gloves to tear about after the initial cut is made lest you slice yourself open on the sharp edges and bleed to death on your new purchase.

angela

Larry David made a whole Curb Your Enthusiasm episode about that blister packaging. I think it should be called Laceration rather than Blister packaging

Outsourced contact centres in India

Amazon has deliberately gotten rid of all blister packs because they were determined (correctly) to be completely "no value add" to the customers. Kudos to them. I hate those things.

Way way back in 1981 the company I worked for bought a brand new IBM PC with DOS 1.1 for 5 grand. :eek:

We got it to the office, followed the directions and hooked up everything and fired it up. We got to the A: prompt. There was no other software AT ALL. With DOS 1.1 there are no sub directories. and the floppies were 360K. The boss boxed it all up and took it back to the IBM salesman. In the end the IBM guys swapped it for a System 36 with a printer and an accounting software package. It had 8 inch floppies that were 1 meg each. We had to hire a programmer to tweak the software to fit our needs.

It was not until Lotus 123 came out in 1983 that we got another PC. It was a real powerhouse. A 6MHz PC-AT with 2 megs of RAM, DOS 3 and a 32 Meg hard drive. I think of that hard drive when I downloaded a recent update to my video card that was 268 MB. Just the video driver!