MPC-Tutor wrote:JAH wrote:But do most users really want innovation from an MPC? Or do they just want popular features found in other hardware samplers/workstations and DAWs? This forum suggests the latter.
End users are not product engineers/designers - they don't tend to think in terms of innovation until they realise it's happened and become gobsmacked over how it's completely changed their whole user experience for the better - until that point, they are just happy to see their little gripes 'fixed'. Akai's normal way of fixing gripes is tweak the existing OS or hardware normally by 'additive' methods. Add an extra button, make the screen bigger, make the MPC bigger to etc.
An innovative approach would be to look at those issues at a more basic level and ask themselves 'Perhaps we're just doing this all wrong. What can we do to completely improve this from a fundamental level? What technology is available to us to change the way the MPC deals with this?'.
End users don't think like that (why should they?), which is why 'asking the forum' for feature suggestions, or observing discussions from afar without directly engaging back and forth with the engineers and product designers is unlikely to lead to any true innovation. You can't expect your customers to suggest the innovation to you.
Rather than 'You asked for this, so we added it', I'd prefer to see 'You asked for this and after investing $$$$$$ researching it, we realized we've been fundamentally doing it all wrong, especially considering the new tech available now' So we went back to the drawing board and came up with this - not only does it fix your gripes, it completely rethinks everything.
Exactly.
As Henry Ford (maybe) said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Breeding faster homing pigeons didn't lead to the internet, and breeding faster horses didn't lead to steam trains and cars. Asking users what they want usually gets you nowhere.
