A recent NY Time article about Kodak included some interesting points. It quoted an electrical engineer who said: "When I joined, I knew my salary came from film sales. But I knew that I would eventually produce paychecks for others." The article then went on to speak about how Kodak hired senior exectives from HP who "exited a mainstay business, health imaging, and took the company back into inkjet printing. And they mined the patent archives for intellectual property, a step that is yielding well above $250 million a year in licensing fees."
I was particularly intrigued by a statement about the approach Kodak was taking as it reentered the inkjet printing business: "We were entering an entrenched market, so we went after the biggest dissatisfier for consumers, the cost of ink".
What I take from the last quote is that, as business people consider new businesses to launch, or companies consider entering new lines of business, they would be well served to aim at the biggest dissatisfier. And if they have intellectual property or business experience they can apply, they'll probably be more successful faster than entering without any background.
What are big dissatisfiers? What industries, products or services aren't meeting the consumer's needs adequately? This can be measured by price, by hassle, etc.
In a scale of dissatsifiers I would imagine the current selection of cars is on the highly satsifying end of the scale - with the selection of cars available to the consumer, I can't imagine there is as much room to grab significant market share as in say personal computers, which I would place at the other end of the spectrum. With personal computers, I don't think the issue is price as much as its hassle - the amount of time each of us spends managing his/her computer is huge - fixing problems with the operating system, lost files, backing up data or dealing with the consequences of not having backed up data etc.. Some of the new, very inexpensive computers seem to begin to address some of the hassles but I think there's a big opportunity to address this particular dissatisfier.
A simplier digital camera to address the frustration associated with learning all the functions. Could a camera manufacturer customize a camera to align with someone's needs? I take 4 kinds of pictures: landscape, portrait, group, night landscape. I don't need a video option on my camera.
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