SW failure…
In the book “Where Nokia Went Wrong” written by James Surowiecki (2013), there is a paragraph that weighs a ton: “In the end, the company profoundly underestimated the importance of software, including the apps that run on smartphones, to the experience of using a phone. Nokia’s development process was long dominated by hardware engineers; software experts were marginalised”.
Cold fact: The most common mistake is related to the HW/SW Lifecycle. Fact: Hardware can’t be easily changed, but software can. Reality: The hardware must be a long-term platform for the software.
Hardware should be as consistent as possible across the various devices and stay in place enough to give trust to the developers (YES, developers! Connected imply some level of Open Innovation) that it’s going to stay, to be supported and last long enough to make their development effort pay off.
Evolving Smart Objects in a 3Y3M* path is a way to stay close with customers needs, take the distance from competitors AND fight UI’s ageing. In fact: any UI embedded in a HW, get old much faster than the HW itself.
Facebook largely passes 1 billion monthly active users and every time that Zuck introduce a new way to do something, the world learn “the new way” in days.
As a consequences UIs’ gets old fast; more over if these UIs are wield somewhere in a physical product.