Skip to main content

Selling on Experiences - How Apple Infiltrated My Living Room with HBO NOW

One of my core beliefs about products has recently been reaffirmed: products are only as valuable as
the experiences they enable. As you are creating, designing, or marketing your product, your efforts might fall short if you ignore this key lesson. In short, lead with what your product features will allow people to do.

In the last couple of weeks, Apple has infiltrated my living room. In spite of the fact that now Apple has introduced duplication of functionality and a couple of extra cords – something I have been resisting for years.

The story starts with me getting the original Xbox and connecting it to the “Windows Media Center," a product I worked on at one point in my life.  Since the original Xbox, I have been loyal to that platform.  I have even hung on to my Xbox 360 even though my Windows Media Center PC has gone away.

Xbox 360 allowed me to cut my cable cord: I used Hulu, Netflix and digital antenna and got more TV than I really wanted in my life.  There was no reason to pay a cable company $60+ (http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/shocker-cable-tv-prices-went-up-four-times-the-rate-of-inflation/)

One of my favorite shows – Game of Thrones – will be enabled on HBO NOW and for next season, which starts on April 12th.  The only way to get Game of Thrones streaming elegantly on the TV in my living room was to buy Apple TV.  HBO has signed a deal with Apple to have exclusive rights to broadcast Game of Thrones.   So we ended up buying an Apple TV and signed up for HBO NOW so that next weekend we can watch the season premier.

You can argue that Xbox is still a better device which can play games like Borderlands. You can argue that it has more horsepower. You can talk about the features until you're blue in the face, but for the average consumer the experiences are what matter. In this case, Apple has enabled an experience that I wasn’t able to get with Xbox. And so, Apple has infiltrated my living room.

After getting the Apple TV, I can tell you that it’s actually pretty good and has it’s advantages, but I would have never known about it if Microsoft was able to get Game of Thrones to broadcast on Xbox.  The key takeaway is: marketing Game of Thrones instead of Apple TV features is what got me to get the device - I discovered the features later.

-mb

PS: if you liked this article you might also want to check out this blog post about starting a mobile app: http://www.mikebz.com/2013/07/so-you-want-to-start-mobile-app-business.html 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SDET / QA Engineer Interview Checklist

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+  years I have come up with a few checklists.  I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team. I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview.  It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit.  I hope you make good use of them.  If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me! SDE/T or QA Engineer interview checklist from Mike Borozdin If you like this checklist you might want to check out these posts: Emotional Intelligence in Software Teams   and  Good-bye manual tester, hello crowdsourcing!
Post a Comment
Read more

Code versus Configuration

At Ethos we are building a distributed mortgage origination system and in mortgage there is a lot of different user types with processes that vary depending on geography.  One of our ongoing discussions is about how much of the logic resides in code vs. being in a workflow system or configuration.  After researching this topic for a bit, I have arrived at a conclusion that the logic should live outside of code very infrequently, which might come as a surprise to a lot of enterprise software engineers. Costs of configuration files and workflow engines First thing that I assume is true is that having any logic outside of the code has costs associated with it.  Debugging highly configurable system involves not only getting the appropriate branch from source control, you also need to make sure that the right configuration values or the database.  In most cases this is harder for programmers to deal with.  In many FinTech companies where the production data is not made readily acce
Post a Comment
Read more

Intuitive Programming - Comments

Comments are a topic of vibrant discussion.  Ever since programmers could leave some text in the program that was ignored by the machine the debate started: “what’s a good comment, what’s a bad comment, why comment?” There are endless instructions to programmers that say many of the following things: 1) Describe your function! 2) Don’t write in the comment what you wrote in the code. 3) Tell people why you are doing what you are doing. What I think has been missing from this discourse is the audience for comments and through those audiences there is intent.  The code is being read, skimmed or analyzed by people and tools.  So what are the audiences and reading modes? 1) Maintaining and enhancing the code 2) Skimming through the entire module or file to figure out what the overall structure is 3) Reviewing the test files to check out the test coverage and edge cases 4) Seeing the docstrings of functions while being in a separate file altogether 5) Reviewi
Post a Comment
Read more