Group think and product design hazards

[Jeff Nolan]

I was reading the recent thread on laser guides and miter saws, the universal consensus is that they are a waste of money. This led me to think about the phenomena of group think in product design for mature products.

I can imagine this conversation taking place at Dewalt:
"hey Milwaukee just added a laser guides to their miter saws, we gotta do that!"

then someone at Makita chimes in:
"hey Milwaukee and Dewalt are adding laser guides to their miter saws... how come we don't have laser guides yet?"

over at Porter Cable:
"jeez if we don't get on this laser guide trend we are toast" which leads the folks over at sister company Delta to say "hey the boys at PC are onto something with this laser guide thing, let's put 'em on our drill presses!"

Finally, an actual consumer is in the local tool emporium and finds that everyone is offering laser guides for $40 extra, which they are offering a promotional discount for because they bought a boatload of laser guides and need to meet their number so with the net price of the same tool in 2 different configurations being the same well of course the consumer picks the one with more stuff.

Back at Tool Mfg Inc. the product guys are patting themselves on the backs because laser guides are a big hit, when offered as an option on the same tool consumers always go for the laser guide fitted model. Case closed, consumers love laser guides so everyone doubles down and puts in orders for more laser guides.

Meanwhile over in forums like this, when the subject comes up it is panned as an option that requires too much fiddling to make work right and doesn't beat the plain 'ol sight up the cut mark and pull the trigger.

The moral of the story is something called the bullwhip effect, a company offers an incremental product enhancement and in order to meet forecasts they manipulate the distribution channels which gives them a false positive which then reinforces the perceived demand and causes an expansion of the original product enhancement, irrespective of whether or not customers actually find it having value.

Manufacturers should spend less time evaluating what competitors are doing and more time looking at actual consumers and prosumers. This is what Festool is doing, perhaps if we had more companies making their own course we wouldn't have to pay Festool prices to enjoy those benefits.

[Peter Pedisich]

Great point, Jeff.

To overcome this type of group think a company and it's product development team must have courage of conviction, a clear sense of who they are and where they want to be as a company, and last but not least, large cash reserves!
The American way of results this quarter, or you're done, are hostile to a long term strategy that benefits both the consumer and producer.

[Brian Kent]

Great point. All of us agree with you completely. We are of one mind.

[Steve Griffin]

Jeff,
Universally consensus?

You should check out this thread
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=120204

I count 19 replies as of 2/7 that say they use it! Of those, there is even a handful who say they love it, though most use it only for rough work.

I'm guessing in a mass produced item, a built in laser adds 5 or 10 bucks to the saw, it seems the saw companies have found a great feature to add and attract buyers.

Got to love it when capitalism nails it.

Oddly enough, group think says a table saw should have a measuring system for the fence, but few woodworkers put a stop system on a miter saw where it can save even more time.....
-Steve

[Jeff Nolan]

re consensus, it screws up my thesis to suggest these are actually valuable

[Greg Pavlov]

I am not sure how much of this is "Group Think" as opposed to "Check-Off Listitis." Something that vendors run into all over the map is that if one manufacturer comes out with a new feature that looks good on paper, a lot of potential buyers start looking for that feature in everyone else's models, regardless of whether anyone actually ever uses it (as long as they think they might use it). And as other vendors feel forced to go along, eventually it becomes a factor in a vendor's sales: given two items that seem to be very close to each other, one difference in the feature list may be enough to knock it out of contention. This is a really major factor in the software arena, where it is usually very easy to add features, so after a while people have to wade through all sorts of stuff they don't need to get to the features they do.

[Mitchell Andrus]

Anybody remember the age in the history of the motorcar when they had a voice telling us to turn off the lights or that the keys were in the ignition? They did it because they could and made the brochure's list of bullet points longer.

"Your door is ajar"
.

[Steve Griffin]

If only my pants had that same feature....

-Steve