Guinea Pig or Lab Mouse

I don’t know about you but I get mighty fed up when I pay good money for a product that often works just about well enough but never seems to work as well as it says it will on the box.  Technology products often fall into this category and they are often subject to frequent online upgrades that are designed to plug the gaps and make good any deficiencies.

I’ll give you an example.  I’ve been a Fitbit user for over seven years already and I think I’m now on my fifth iteration of their wearable technology.  In other words and in round figures, I’ve probably invested about A$1,000 (approximately USD 700) in such products.

So, if I’m never 100% satisfied with their products why do I keep buying them?  Am I throwing good money after bad?

To a degree this must be so but, to look at the positive side of the balance sheet, I have to confess that my Fitbits have contributed to my general level of health.  I refer to them as my conscience.  I try to walk 40-50 kms (25-30 miles) every week and my Fitbit constantly reminds me how well I’ve done so far and how much walking I have left to do in my week.

Does my Fitbit do everything it says it will do on the box?  Never in my experience.  It does all of the things some the time and never does some of the other things it claims to do.  Does this matter?  To me it certainly does and I often consider changing my loyalty to say Garmin or one of the other competitors.

To a great extent I feel like I am part of Fitbit’s testing team, very strangely this is a privilege for which I have paid when I often feel I should have been paid.  Do you know this thing sometimes decides to stop working in the middle of the night when it should be monitoring my sleep?  It never discharges its sworn duty to remind me to move every waking hour nor does it ever transmit an incoming SMS message to its screen.  Believe me I have tried, and tried again, to persuade these features to work but to absolutely no avail.

I’m told that a product such as this is normally brought to market as a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ - MVP for short.  In other words it works just about well enough to sell it for a few hundred dollars.

Is this the strategy adopted when lives are at stake - with pharmaceutical drugs or new airliners perhaps?  The pressure to launch new and advanced products to consumers has always been present, I suppose, but is it morally justifiable to make us, the consumers, the guinea pigs?  Where is our share of the commercial reward?

I suppose there must be little doubt the astronauts and cosmonauts of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and onwards took enormous risks when exploring the frontiers of space despite the fact that risk minimisation had taken taken place by virtue of flights undertaken using chimpanzees and dogs.  Similar risks are to be faced by the crews of the upcoming Artemis programme.

Having said all that, I don’t really enjoy being used as a guinea pig - or as a lab mouse if you prefer to use that term.  I expect my purchases to work properly straight out of the box.