Microsoft’s MP3 player sports 3 colors: black, white and… BROWN! This weird choice inspire me this reflexion about innovation, design, and focus groups.
As we all know innovation is certainly not a key for success when it is about market shares. Microsoft holds the biggest share in the global PC related software market. But they always were good followers. And there’s nothing bad at that.

When they decided to have their own iPod they didn’t spend any precious brain cycles in figuring out something really new and smart, they did focus groups! With focus groups you can seize what consumers want, what are they supposed to buy. Focus groups attendants are average people like you and I, they have no clue of what they will love before actually falling in love with it. They legitimately don’t care.

In this context, it appears quite symptomatic to end with a device sporting a “no-color” like brown. Brown is the colorfull equivalent of grey, it’s an average and faded mix of all colors people can think of without being able to isolate one. Everything in the world might look brown to color-agnostic people like most of us. Artist are able to extract from this brown soup vivid colors that better render the reality than reality itself.

Here is where focus groups are leading to cul-de-sacs. Do not use them to validate subjective choices you took with your convictions and expertise. Use them only to validate objective aspects of your product.

This is good news, because focus groups cost a lot of time and money. Do not use them before your development is solid enough and your ideas are internally proofed by people trully involved.