People remember experiences. They don’t remember attributes or benefits or features.

The quote is from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter and Gamble, in the January 28, 2005 Business Week.

It’s something I struggle with often as a product manager. Like most product managers, I’m technical, so I love all the new features and gewgaws. But as I look back at my previous releases and at customer response to them (and my own response, since I use my own product on a daily basis), I find it hard to remember which features were new and which were always there. My experience today with the product is what matters – it’s a great result when the improvement of experience aligns with the new features. I’m happy to say that the new version of my product is working out that way. But I’ve certainly shipped features in the past that excited me as a technologist, and that were expensive and fancy and worked well, but that didn’t improve the customer experience. On the other hand, was that energy wasted? In some cases yes, but luckily there are other metrics for success in addition to experience, such as addressing a particular customer’s needs, or moving to a better technology, or enabling a new capability (such as an API) that won’t affect customer’s experience except indirectly.

Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a decade, a report released Tuesday suggests. By then, the price parity could propel solar adoption so that it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2025

If you listen to this kind of thinking, solar energy (which is defined as what, by the way?) is still far more expensive than other kinds. But solar energy, even today, has a finite payback time – if I put solar collectors on my roof, for example, eventually they will pay for themselves.

So that’s one way it’s wrong.

Secondly, the study assumes that conventional energy prices will go up by 3% per year. That could be a slight underestimate. Didn’t we just experience a three month period where gas prices nearly doubled? (That’s 100%, folks!).

I can’t make any argument about the assumption that solar energy prices will come down 18% per year. That’s a lot, by one metric, but we’ve certainly seen large and faster price drops in high tech in the past. Even the iPhone, last week, dropped in price by almost 50% in less than a year. Sure, that was partly through some magic AT&T financial pixie dust, but to the user, it’s a clear 50% price cut. There’s no reason similar magic pixie dust, whether from the government or from the utilities themselves, won’t contribute to market price declines.

The claim that solar currently accounts for less than 1/10th of a percent of the U.S. energy supply today is fine. But the assumption that it will still be less than 1 percent in 2015 (seven years from now) is curious. If we start at .1 percent, and double our solar usage every year, we end up at 128 times as much – 12.8% of today’s total. This is the amazing power of Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Even if it takes two years for each doubling, we’re still up a factor of 32x in seven years. That means 3.2% today’s usage. Our total energy usage may also go up (although there are very good reasons to think it may not go up much and and will be starting a downward trajectory), but for a 32x increase in solar supply to translate to 1% of our total energy use, total energy use would have to double. Not too likely in the U.S., where population growth has stopped, and SUVs are starting their long decline.

Finally, there’s good reason to believe that solar energy will actually have a much larger share of U.S. energy usage, due to the power of “negawatts” (as explained brilliantly by Amory Lovins in this series of talks at Stanford in 2007), in which efficiency turns out to be the most cost effective way to power industry and create profits. Oh, and by the way, it significantly reduces our energy usage, by as much as a factor of five to seven!

The article combines a couple of types of fallacious thinking – that technological progress is linear, for example, rather than geometric, and that other factors, such as the desire to reduce greenhouse gases or realizing the benefits of negawatts throughout the economy, don’t have an additional accelerating effect on technology changes.

Folding doors that actually fold! The video is definitely worth watching. It’s a really outside the box thinking experience.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model Concept (2008)

…Edison changed the image of the sole inventor by converting innovation to a process with recognized steps practiced by a team of inventors working together…

Definitely an inspiring opening – I guess if Edison could do it 120 years ago, we should be able to do it now!

I got this Innovation Management Overview link via the Innovation Tools site (which itself has a lot of great information on innovation, including a feed of innovation-related news).

By the standards of six years ago, those things are free now. Of course, it’s never free as in beer, because in fact we’re now using all the bandwidth, storage and CPU power we thought we’d never need, doing things a lot of us though we’d never be able to do in real life, like watch streaming live TV on our laptops (and our phones).

Today, I listened to Jeff Hawkins’ talk at ETech a year ago, Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like A Brain?, where he announced the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing. I think the idea now is, “If you’re not planning for how you’ll use human-like pattern recognition in your system, you’re not planning.”

What are the possibilities? Jeff listed a few, but there will be lots we’re not even thinking about now (or think are impossible – like we thought watching TV on mobile phones would be). It’s “human-like,” but not human. It can do things we don’t have time or patience for (just like a computer can do arithmetic all day that would drive us bonkers, even if we could do it as fast). And it can do pattern matching on patterns we can’t see – whether those are in infrared, or in huge piles of data that we just don’t have the sensory apparatus for.

Here’s an example. I have a product that manages requirements and their relationships to customers and customer requests (among other things). I talk regularly to customers, and take notes on these conversations. They often mention desires or usage scenarios that are outside the scope of the topic of the conversation at the time, and that aren’t seem related to the product planning I’m doing. Two years later, when I’m actually considering adding features related to those comments, I don’t necessarily remember the conversation. Or if I remember it, I don’t remember which customer made the comment. Currently I use Google Desktop to help me find the appropriate notes, but it’s a pretty rough approach – I have to use my best guess at the appropriate key words, and I end up spending a heck of a lot of time combing through my notes again and again. I’d love to have a human-like agent do this trolling for me – on a weekly basis, review all my old notes against my current requirements and tell me where there are overlaps. And while we’re at it, maybe it can read my blogroll and find related articles I could be referring to.

I know there are a few products out there that (claim to) do some of this already, and perhaps they work (I haven’t tested them). If so, they are the vanguard of this new set of capabilities, and in a few years they will have been overshadowed by realities we’re only dreaming about now.

How are you planning for the technical capabilities – human-like pattern matching or whatever it might be – that we’ll have at our command in five or ten years?

…television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television…

His key idea is that society as a whole is coming off a bender (of sitcoms and other television shows) brought about in response to the sudden reality of “free time” after WWII. And now that we’re off the bender, we have a lot of attention to put on things that we didn’t before – like Wikipedia, and World of Warcraft, and … social media, social transformation, social innovation… and whatever we can think of. That:

…however lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf [i.e., play WoW], I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter [i.e., watch Gilligan's island].

Another brain-opening meme from Clay (his ETech talk about ontologies from several years ago was another major brain-opener for me). You can buy his new book Here Comes Everybody if you want to read more.