Quality vs Efficiency July 8, 2008
Posted by sdpurtill in : Technology, Web 2.0, Information, Ideas , trackbackWalter Chrysler once said, “Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” Companies succeed because of the “laziness” trait found in people - I think of it in a more positive way as the endless search for absolute efficiency. Nearly every electronic device you own and website you go to were built with the intention of making your life more efficient. If people didn’t care about getting from A to B the fastest, Google wouldn’t have a 200B market cap, Tumblr wouldn’t exist, you’d do meetings in person instead of IM, cell phone cameras would have never taken off, and for that matter cell phones probably would have never taken off (cost:efficiency ratio wouldn’t be justified by consumers).
This has become very real for me recently after buying a Canon EOS 20D camera (digital SLR). I could get into the camera and spend 10 minutes talking about all the features, how much fun it is to shoot with, how well the pictures turn out (here’s my Flickr), etc., but I still don’t use it a tenth as much as I use the always-out-of-focus-and-way-too-pixelated camera on my BlackBerry Pearl. It’s a very simple equation in my head: walk around all day with an expensive bulky camera strapped around your neck (not to mention how lame you look going to parties with an SLR) OR pull out a hand sized device and snap a picture in 3 seconds.
Forget the quality of the photos for a second; what is my goal in taking photos? Personally, the photos *I want* are moments frozen in time that I will be able to go back to in 5, 10, 20 years to see how much I’ve changed. I feel the best way to do this is to always have the camera on my cell phone ready to fire, because the moments that you remember come and go so fast it’s hard to know when you should have your digital SLR ready to freeze a moment. I also think that when you are dragging around a SLR to an event/concert/function you miss out on a lot of the fun because you’re so engaged in taking pictures of other people having fun and sights that you forget to live in the moment. A cell phone camera lets you live in the moment and capture an image to prove that it happened/you were there.
The most important part of the photography efficiency war is ease of publishing. Taking the photo is only the beginning. With an SLR you generally do some post production on the RAW files and then spend an hour or two uploading them to Flickr/Facebook/your blog. With a cell phone camera the process is: snap -> email -> done. This process takes about 12 seconds for me. If you have a Tumblr account you know what I mean. I’ve become so used to emailing photos to my Tumblr that anytime I compose an email on my BlackBerry I begin writing “Tu” in the TO field of the message.
And I’ve come to realize - the photos I find most interesting on the internet are ones snapped with cell phones. The quality on all phones are terrible right now (even the Nokia N95 is pretty bad), but in the next few years I expect the cell phone companies to come out with major improvements on their cameras. This will hopefully end the barrage of people at tech events walking around with their bulky SLRs and making sure to capture moments - along with 30 other photographers - of a few people having fun. There is still a need for artistic photography which will never run dry, but that will eventually find its place too.
Whatever product you are building or thinking of building, keep in mind that the you can sacrifice quality for efficiency. The biggest proof for that has been the huge success of cell phone cameras even though SLRs are in a similar price range and take exponentially higher quality photos.
On a final note, there are still very obvious efficiency holes that need to be patched up (governments and education are #1 and #2 on the need list). I am talking about your next startup.
Comments»
very true. well written!
Great post. Very true. Keep on rockin’.