Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Easier isn’t better if it means trading something of intrinsic value for the sake of simplicity.
iTunes, for example, created an environment for users to easily log in, audition, and buy any song in Apple’s exhaustive catalog of music, and users can download their newly-purchased audio files to as many as five devices. In terms of ease, Apple trumped the old method of acquiring new music—a process which used to steal a half hour of our time, a half-gallon of gas, and as much as fifteen dollars (for an entire album if the preferred song wasn’t available on 7” or maxi-single CD).
Thanks to iTunes, a song may be owned in less than a minute for around a dollar without having to leave the couch. And what about the old-school idea of “making tapes” so as to enjoy that brand new album away from home? Apple simplified that process as well when it gave consumers the ability to propagate their purchased songs across nearly a half dozen devices with a single mouse click. No more Saturday afternoons spent connecting disc player outputs to tape recorder inputs. So why isn’t this new, “easier” method better?
Well, if you happen to value owning the highest possible audio quality, or gazing at full resolution album artwork (front and back), or studying j-card liner notes that include photos, lyrics, and the names of all the professionals who helped create each song, or showing off your prized collection of records, tapes, and discs, then you’re out of luck. iTunes’ “ease” satisfies only the want of quick ownership, meanwhile giving up supreme audio fidelity, gorgeous framable artwork, and treasure troves of trivia.
Fast food drive-thru is another obvious example of “ease”. How could it not be? You drive up, roll down your window, bark your order at a small billboard, drive another 25 feet, and with any luck you get what you asked for—probably for less money than the sum total of each ingredient purchased from your local farmers market. Perfect! So why isn’t such a convenience better? Nutritional health, for one. Try comparing the calorie counts, saturated fat percentages, sodium levels, sugar contents, and preservatives of a fast food meal to that of the very same meal made at home with ingredients bought from your local grocery store.
This segues nicely to point number two: Where exactly did your fast food come from? And how long was it there before it got here? Many fast food products arrive frozen, already prepared, and are merely heated up just prior to serving. Several articles have alleged some rather astonishing (and disgusting) food-processing practices engaged by many of the largest fast food chains, and while these practices may be sanctioned by the FDA, wouldn’t we prefer knowing a bit more about the origin of what we’re putting in our mouths? Once again, the “ease” of fast food only sates those hungering for quickness—forgoing the nutritional benefits of fresh food and the knowledge of the food’s source all the while.
We might also consider the law of supply and demand and its effects arising from “ease”. When the usage of a product or service becomes easier, less expertise is required by its users. These new, easier-to-use products and services attract swarms of unskilled individuals—potentially diminishing the value of a product or service that once required a well-paid specialist.
Seasoned photographers, for example, now compete with selfie-driven paparazzo who have on their smartphones incredibly high-resolution cameras and plenty of app ware that automatically detects “problems” and clears them up with little effort (or understanding of what’s actually happening) by the user. Easy just gave birth to cheap. The photographer must now defend concepts like excellence and experience to justify his pricing.
Same goes for music creation: no longer does one necessarily have to dedicate a lifetime to an instrument, hours of study, and endless practice in order to produce palatable music; instead, all that’s needed is a laptop equipped with a twenty-dollar app, and users can simply browse massive, built-in libraries of someone else’s music, and simply drag and drop these pre-made sound bytes into an audio track (enter the modern "DJ"), and Voila! A completed musical “composition”.
Easier? Sure. Better? This author doesn’t think so.
At Gearco, our primary objective is to service the needs of the hospitality industry by offering an ever-growing digital athenaeum of valuable property management applications. That’s the perspective from which we hope our customers see us. From the inside, what you’ll find is a software development company endeavoring to balance convenience with effectiveness for our users, and what we’ve discovered is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the simple and the powerful.
As simplicity increases, power dwindles—and vice versa. As you might have guessed, we chose power. And to neutralize the complexity of our software, we offer our customers a wide spectrum of training options ranging from online, distance-learning courses to personalized, onsite instruction taught by our product specialists.
Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” In other words, “easier” isn’t always “better”.
