Should this exist?
Have you ever come around a piece of technology that you would wonder ‘why did they do this?’. The first things that come to my mind are devices like smart fridges, smart washing machines, and almost all things that come with a ‘smart’ label.
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A special product that comes to my mind Juicero, a juice press company founded in Silicon Valley, promising a healthy life, cold and fresh fruit and vegetable juice, with the convenience of not having to shop and the vegetables for yourself, it was priced $400 USD, each bag of juice is $5 USD. And it turns out it was just an expensive press with and app, and a lot of unnecessary configuration just to squeeze a bag of shopped vegetables. It’s the most useless product it’s ever existed. Yet, they received millions on founding because they had a good speech. the CEO of Juicero even wrote a Medium article about how this “system” produces value to their customers and provides a great experience, overall, it’s all unintentionally funny by how inconvenient the product is, and by how the guy tries to push it too hard. You can find the article here.
So when I saw this week’s headlines about hacking and hand-squeezing Produce Packs, I had a one overriding thought: ”We know hacking consumer products is nothing new. But how can we better demonstrate the incredible value we know our connected system delivers?”
I believe Juicero represents all that is wrong with the Silicon Valley “disruptive” company. They created a vision and mission for their product, with the objective of Change the world, disrupt the tech industry, and Improve the life of it’s customers, but they only provide with an overly complicated device connected to the internet with no purpose whatsoever, but to make sure that you only use their own bags of juice.
So, why do we need a machine that squeezes our juice bags? why do we need a machine that turns on the lights, instead of hitting the switch by ourselves? They are creating a culture similar to a pyramid scheme, in the sense that they try to convince in the thinking that you absolutely need their product, you should buy their expensive services, and they do it by saying things like these:
The journey from Coca-Cola to carrots to Juicero’s rainbow of fruits and vegetables has let me connect my work to my personal mission and passion: solving some of our nation’s nutrition and obesity challenges. I’m very proud of what my teams and I have accomplished in the last ten years, especially in regard to positively shifting the dialogue about our food system and how it can better serve all of us in health, nutrition, and sustainability. All of that was training for becoming CEO of Juicero — the single most ambitious and inspiring job I’ve ever held.
Let me conclude saying, please, before you buy into any new product or service, think twice. Do you really need it? What value does it add to your life? Is it worth the money? Does it really simplify the task it solves, instead of adding complexity to it?
