Needy Technology
Why does my phone keep notifying me about birthdays of people I've never met? Why did my smart thermostat turn itself off overnight in winter? Why does my gas bill keep getting sent to the spam folder even though I've told my email client to label it as important?
If you've ever struggled with issues like this, you've encountered what I call "needy technology". To me, needy technology means a product whose technical value-add is significantly harmed by the amount of effort needed to use or configure it. I suspect you can think of many more examples than the three I gave above - needy technology is ubiquitous in modern life. While different people might accept different levels of effort, or have the background to use different technologies more effectively, practically everyone has their own story about needy technology.
The hallmark of needy technology is that it represents a real technical advance over the past, but at an excessive cost. It's the technical product version of what Germans call a "Schlimmbesserung" - an improvement that makes things worse. Traditional technologies typically required extra effort from the consumer because they stagnated relative to competitors or otherwise became obsolete, like how a vinyl record player needs help to connect to your Bluetooth speaker.
Needy technology is becoming ever more prominent owing to the increasing penetration of technical products in everyday activities, the rapid pace of technical change, and perhaps most importantly, the recent focus on disruption, rather than customer utility, in novel technologies. Product researchers and UX designers are on the front lines in making new technologies useful and palatable to consumers. Yet, quirks in backend code for webservers or embedded systems for IoT are a major cause of needy technology. In my own area of AI and machine learning, the community is just starting to come to grips with how AI systems can exhibit their own stubborn neediness. Those issues can't just be left to frontend folks to handle on their own - they require the attention of their own technical specialties.
So, I'd like to ask the technical leaders out there: Do you experience needy technology in your own everyday lives? How do you keep an eye out for the growth of neediness in the technologies you lead? And most importantly for your customers, what do you do to keep your own technical value-add free from the curse of needy technology?