Barrier to Entry
Earlier I wrote a few postings about why it is so hard to make things easy to use. I have been thinking about this concept recently, but from a different angle.
The world is a big place. It’s big enough that we have a hard time comprehending its size. Six billion inhabitants or so. 40 million meters in circumference. Modern transportation and communications make these things seem relatively trivial. Most of us today think it is rather quaint that people only a century ago rarely traveled far from home, or that six or seven centuries before that people actually believed the world was flat.
With so much out there in the world, it’s awfully hard to do something original. In fact, it’s so hard to think truly original thoughts, that when someone does and bothers to document it, we give that person a doctoral degree. (And even then, doctoral theses are starting to seem less unique and perhaps more petty.)
Perhaps as individuals we do not feel the need to be quite so unique. After all, many of us spend large portions of our lives trying to gain some level of acceptance and approbation from those around us. But for companies in capitalist markets, the rule is differentiate or die. To this end, company leaders are constantly asking themselves what they can do to distance themselves from the competition — how they can erect barriers to entry on their turf.
In fact, I believer there are relatively few true barriers. Some will argue that things like patents, copyrights, and trademarks are barriers to entry. I suppose they are — but they are particularly weak ones. Clever imitators can easily get around most of these — and that’s only if they choose to abide by the law. These methods are particularly ineffective for small companies, as most cannot afford to hire armies of lawyers to prosecute offenders (indeed, they may be struggling just to keep away illegitimate challenges).
To me, the real barriers to entry are more about doing things that others will not do. Of course there are several reasons why others may choose not to copy. One reason may be that the idea is a poor one. A company pursuing a bad business idea will generally enjoy a competition-free landscape, but that does not make it business successful. When the idea is a good one, however, others usually shy away for one of two reasons: either the work is too hard, or the work is too dirty.
At this point, I am sure there are people out there screaming at me, saying that there is another reason: that others simply do not comprehend what it is that we do. The old trade secret argument. But the fact of the matter is that trade secrets are nothing more than hard work performed only once and then protected (as opposed to the kind of hard work that is recurring). With six billion people in the world, there really is not anything stopping others from reinventing what you may have already discovered. In fact, they are just as likely to do it better — and then what value is the secret?
So, if we want to win the game, we are left with the choice between hard work and dirty work. Of course these types of work take many forms. And one of those forms is to design for usability. Because usability is not easy to achieve, it’s devilishly difficult. Usability requires making choices that are not always fully quantifiable. It requires top down innovation that sometimes rejects the results of focus groups and customer surveys. It requires leaps of faith, and gut wrenching challenges to the status quo. It requires relentless rethinking of fundamental principles coupled with rapid implementation and enough consistency and familiarity to remain almost unnoticeable to most people. Usability is one of the toughest, most precarious balancing acts around. And it is therefore a magnificent barrier to entry. No wonder most companies wish they were doing it. No wonder most don’t.