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

Why you should take the software job in San Francisco (or not).

Silicon Valley is an iconic place for technology.  Many people say this is the place for the “best and the brightest.”. Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter and other top companies draw a lot of talent form all over the world and the largest chunk of VC capital goes to companies in the Bay Area, so it seems like moving here is a no brainer!

The real situation is actually not that simple, I believe there are three scenarios where it makes sense, but in many cases living in the Bay yields disappointing results.  The cost of living, housing situation, homeless catastrophe make places like San Francisco a lot less appealing to a lot of people.  So in what situations does it make sense to move to SF?

Startup founder raising millions There are many places to be a startup founder, but if you are looking to raise capital the largest pool of VC money is in the Bay Area.  There is an established network, events and conferences which give founders an opportunity to pitch more people th…
Post a Comment
Read more

Sensitivity and Introverts

"Software developers are creative human beings and they need to make sense of unpredictable, turbulent environments"

- Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, Pekka Abrahamsson "Software developers, moods, emotions, and performance" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.4422.pdf

Team output can vary dramatically based on the emotional state so neglecting emotions yield to worse performance.  Beyond the pure output no one wants to spend much time in a place where they do not feel good.  It can lead to turnover and engineers applying their talents elsewhere.

There is a stereotype of engineers being highly analytical so in communication with them "facts is all that matters."  This point of view is often not correct.  In "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" Suan Cain talks about the correlation of introversion, hypersensitivity and involvement in professions that require deep thought, such as software development.

The same engineer…
Post a Comment
Read more