Yes, you read that right. There are ways to remove features and increase a product’s appeal.
This post was sparked off when I heard about GPSVoice, a new mobile app that uses GPS to help parents track their children’s location without draining battery life.
More on the app in a bit but lest you think I’m spouting some new-fangled product marketing theory, let me assure you that product managers have been using this tactic for a long time.
Once upon a time, when I had more hair on my head and less head on my shoulder than now, I used to sell PCs, Servers and other types of computer hardware at a leading IT company. This was in the late 1980s when the PC/AT, based on Intel’s 80386 processor, was the hottest selling model in the mainstream commercial market. For the niche but burgeoning scientific market, Intel introduced the 80386DX processor, which integrated the so-called math coprocessor / Floating Point Unit (FPU) into the basic 386 chip.
A couple of years later, Moore’s Law beckoned and it was time for the next model of processor. Out came the 486. In line with then prevailing business ethos that a new model of a processor – or any product for that matter – must be a superset of the old model, the 486 included an onchip FPU and was appropriately called 80486DX.
Unfortunately for Intel, sales of 486DX-based PCs didn’t take off as expected. The mainstream business market felt that a chip that started out by being more powerful than 386 and then bundled a math coprocessor on top of that would be an overkill for wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentations and other office automation tasks, thereby relegating the 486DX to AutoCAD, Desktop Publishing and other high-end but niche applications. (Just for reference, CPU and RAM guzzlers like Word, Excel and Powerpoint hadn’t yet became household names at the time.)
Desperate to grow revenues, Intel needed a new chip for the mainstream market and launched the 486SX within a few weeks. Positioning the new processor as 486 without the FPU, Intel priced it aggressively in comparison with 80386DX. The market responded favorably and sales of 486SX machines soared.
We industry insiders were wondering how the heck Intel could launch a new CPU so fast when it normally took 12-18 months to design and manufacture a new CPU. A few weeks later, we had the answer: 486SX was created by breaking a pin on the 486DX to disable its math coprocessor function! As Wikipedia would retrospectively observe when came into existence a decade later, “486SX chips were actually 486DX chips with a defective FPU”.
This was my first exposure to how you could remove a feature and broaden a product’s appeal.
Cue to the present era and the aforementioned GPSVoice app.
If you’re a frequent user of location-based apps or the developer of LBS apps like my company is, you’d know that GPS drains battery very rapidly.
If you’re a parent of a Millennial child, you’d know that Gen Y and Gen Z kids hate to be stalked by their parents (Well, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers were no different when they were kids, just that the lack of cellphones in that era renders the point moot!).
Against that backdrop, GPSVoice seemed to have cracked not one but two Holy Grails by claiming that it used GPS to track children’s location without draining battery life!
When I first heard about the app, I began wondering if it had achieved this feat by inventing some new, pathbreaking, patent-pending technology.
But the more I thought about it, the more déjà vu feeling I had with Intel’s 486SX product management sleight-of-hand.
I tend to believe that GPSVoice has removed the proverbial pin and used a key insight into human behavior to tweak the way a certain feature works. Let me elaborate:
As most people would’ve observed, once it’s switched on, the GPS in a smartphone remains ON even when there’s no need to track the phone’s location. This default mode in which GPS works is the main reason why LBS apps – including, sigh, my company’s own LBTR360 location based task reminder app – suffer from rapid battery drain problem.
I surmise that GPSVoice has removed this feature.
How does it track location then?
While children don’t like to be stalked, most of them do tell their parents where they are when their parents call to ask. Now suppose their parents call them and they’re unable to take the call. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if their phone answers their parents’ “where are you?” question on their behalf.
Which is what I’m guessing GPSVoice does: It uses the unanswered call to switch on the GPS and start tracking location.
With this design approach, GPSVoice tries to kill two birds with one stone:
- Preserves battery life (since it doesn’t keep the GPS on all the time)
- Sidesteps children’s objections to stalking (since it reports location only if children don’t answer their parents’ call).
Only time will tell how that flies.
As of now, my teenage Gen Z daughter has agreed to the install the app. Based on that data point of one, I’m predicting that GPSVoice will achieve mainstream adoption very soon!
