I was in a meeting today and one of our employees got frustrated because the screen on his iPhone had frozen, forcing him to shut down his app and reopen it. In about 30 seconds he was back to where he needed to be, harmless enough. If you had seen his reaction though you might have thought that Apple had deliberately planned on ruining his entire day. I found the incident amusing but also began to reflect on how high are expectations are for technology these days.
The iPhone (or any smart phone) is a globally connected supercomputer that fits in our pocket and allows us to to communicate with anyone around the world instantly, for free. Pretty powerful stuff. It amazing if you step back and think about how far we've come in the last decade. So many of us, myself included, forget how lucky we are to be living in a world where we have access to any bit of information we could possibly want at out fingertips at all times. All tech companies should also recognize how high consumer's expectations are and make sure that their product is able to meet or surpass them, or risk being beat by someone who can deliver an almost perfect user experience.