• by April 11, 2008

You're just seeing another manifestation of the constant push-pull between marketers and technologists. Technologists, and tech-savvy people, tend to love feature lists. True marketers will always want to home in on two or three key consumer benefits.

A lot of product development is unfortunately done via laundry list. Build the biggest, longest and most acronym-laden checklist and they'll come, is how the thinking goes. But "they," by and large, don't come. Nobody wants a ton of features. Tell me what the benefit is.

And I think that's what a lot of the problem with the mobile Web is. Forget the whiz-bang stuff you CAN do with the platform. Give me something that's going to benefit me as the user.

Buy a soda from a machine with some kind of mobile micro-payment app lashup? Err, no. Coins solved that problem years ago. Give me a way to see a full Web page on my phone, so I can rebook a flight during a storm at LaGuardia (my actual experience on an iPhone)? Now that's a benefit I'm willing to pay for.

Think "benefit rich" products, not "feature laden," and we'll get consumers to adopt our devices and media.