Thummer as Purple Cow

I recently had the founder of a music technology company tell me that he wanted to hire me to evangelize his company's music technology products, because I “must be an incredible evangelist to have gotten such amazing national press for the Thummer” (e.g., the Wall Street Journal story and a forthcoming story by CBS News Sunday Morning).

He missed the point completely. The Thummer is getting remarkable press because the Thummer is remarkable – literally “worthy of remark.” The Thummer is, in Seth Godin’s memorable phrase, a Purple Cow.

Here’s the essence of Godin’s Purple Cow Theory, drawn from the above-linked article:
When was the last time you noticed a cow? Saw a cow on the side of the road, pulled over and gawked… Not likely. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring.

A purple cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to.

Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible. The world is full of boring stuff — brown cows — which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, then it's invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about can have an enormous payoff.

If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn't everyone do it? Because people are so afraid. "Playing it safe" and "following the rules" seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing; not standing out is the same as being invisible. The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

The Thummer is not just remarkable, it’s remarkable in four different ways – (1) its unparalleled expressive power, (2) its unprecedented ease of learning, (3) its revolutionary Dynamic Tonality, and (4) its shockingly low price (compared to other button-field controllers like the Tenori-On and Monome, which don’t even come close to the Thummer on any of the first three points).

These are exactly the benefits needed to disrupt the music products industry.

As Bill Gates once famously said, “to create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures peoples' imagination.”

It takes a Purple Cow – a purple cow like the Thummer.

Successful New Musical Interfaces: Why So Rare?

Why is the mainstream commercial success of new musical interfaces so rare?

Here’s my reasoning:

1. The characteristics required for ANY new product to be successful are that it be simpler, cheaper, and/or more powerful;
2. All new musical interfaces are inherently disruptive;
3. A disruptive new product has to be two or three times better than current offerings along at least two of these dimensions (simplicity, affordability, power);
4. The vast majority of proposed new musical interfaces do not deliver benefits sufficient to disrupt the status quo.

If there's any novelty to this analysis, it's in the observation that any new musical interface is inherently disruptive. You can introduce a "new and improved" synthesis algorithm to a keyboard synthesizer, electrify a guitar, or even make drum heads electronic, without requiring significant changes to the instrument's interface. These are sustaining innovations, as far as the musical instrument consumer is concerned. But any change to a musical instrument' interface is inherently disruptive -- and disruptive innovations must deliver a much higher level of benefit to become successful.

There are other minor issues, such as:

• The availability of complementary goods, which in the music products industry include compelling demonstrations of the new interface’s virtuosic potential, interface-specific arrangements of popular music, and interface-specific education materials. However, these days, such materials can be generated free, rapidly, and with high quality by the interface’s early-adopter community, and shared over the Internet.
• The Long Tail favors products which have low inventory & shipping costs, such as tiny instruments which can be manufactured on demand by any consumer electronics-capable factory (without the need for specialized music-related skills or equipment).
• YouTube and other viral marketing mechanisms favor products which provide visually-engaging benefits, such as the use of internal motion sensors to control musical effects.

For any proposed new musical interface, the question then becomes: “is it sufficiently better in ways that matter to the potential market and which facilitate rapid diffusion?” For the vast majority of proposed new interfaces, the answer has been “no.”

Does the Thummer meet this stringent standard? Time will tell – but I think that it does, and I’m not alone in this belief.

Delayed Binding

As a every computer programmer knows, “early binding” associates a two entities at compile time, whereas “late binding” associates two entities at run time. Late binding usually requires the identification of a new, higher-level abstraction, at which level all possible bindings look “the same,” allowing them to be delayed. Generally speaking, early binding is limiting, whereas late binding is liberating.

Here are two products which liberate consumers through delayed binding: the kapoosh Universal Knife Block and the Gator-Grip Universal Socket.

Knife Blocks
The traditional wooden knife block contains a set of slots that match the width, thickness, and length of the knives that come with it. The number and dimensions if a given knife block’s slots are “statically bound” to the number and dimensions of a given knife set at the time of manufacture.

The kapoosh Universal Knife Block abstracts the notion of “knife slot” by replacing the knife-block’s slotted wooden body with a tightly-packed matrix of flexible plastic rods. Knives of any width or thickness (within wide limits) can be inserted into the rod-matrix, with the rods shifting aside to make room. The kapoosh’s knife-slots are “dynamically bound” to match the dimensions of a given knife at the moment of its insertion into the rod-matrix.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture to time of use is what makes the kapoosh “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

The kapoosh scores highly on Rogers’ diffusion-rate factors (power, simplicity, compatibility, observability, & trialability), so awareness of the kapoosh should diffuse rapidly.

The kapoosh is

• Simple: “Learned” instantly, its use is easier than other knife blocks because you don’t have to think about which knife goes in which slot.
• Cheap: At $29.99, it’s cheaper than traditional wooden knife blocks.
• Powerful: It is compatible with all kitchen knives, from all manufacturers, so it is more “powerful” than traditional wooden knife blocks.
• Unique: Its key innovation – its core of long flexible plastic rods – is patented.

Brand-name knife sets bundled with the kapoosh knife block are now starting to appear, which suggests that the kapoosh can disrupt the market for knife & block bundles in addition to the market for stand-alone knife blocks.

Because the kapoosh is highly disruptive and can diffuse rapidly, it is very likely to disrupt the market for wooden knife blocks.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of the kapoosh is an abstraction of the notion of “knife slot” to a level which allows binding of knife & slot at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture, liberating the consumer from having to care about matching knives & slots. The consumer value and disruptive potential of the kapoosh is the direct result of delayed binding.

Socket Sets
Most mechanics’ tool kits include a ratcheted socket wrench and a socket set which contains a large number of sockets. The internal cavity in a given socket perfectly encloses a hexagonal nut of a given standard size, making it easy to turn with the socket wrench. Standards vary (inevitably), so one usually needs a set of metric-sized sockets and another set of Imperial/American-sized sockets. Each socket’s internal cavity is “statically bound” to a particular standard nut size at the time of manufacture.

The Gator Grip Universal Socket abstracts the notion of “socket cavity” by replacing all of the sockets with a single socket filled with pins. Placed over a hex nut of any size, the nut pushes many of the pins back, forming a tight-fitting “socket cavity” that grips the nut. The Gator-Grip socket’s cavity is “dynamically bound” to match the dimensions of a given nut at the moment the socket’s pin-matrix is pressed down over the nut.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture to time of use is what makes the Gator-Grip socket “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

The Gator-Grip scores highly on Rogers’ diffusion-rate factors (power, simplicity, compatibility, observability, & trialability), so awareness of the Gator-Grip should diffuse rapidly. Its manufacturers have not yet posted a YouTube video demonstrating how it works, which if available would improve its observability and hence its diffusion.

The Gator-Grip is

• Simple: One socket for all nuts, metric or inches – no thought required.
• Cheap: At $9.99, it’s cheaper than traditional socket sets.
• Powerful: One socket to rule them all...
• Unique: Its key innovation – the matrix of metal pins – is patented.

Online reviews suggest that the Gator-Grip is not quite as universal nor as easy to use as is claimed, so its relative advantage (power) is lower than that of the kapoosh, so it is less disruptive – but if these deficiencies can be addressed, it could become highly disruptive.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of the Gator Grip is an abstraction of the notion of “socket cavity” to a level which allows binding of nut & cavity at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture, liberating the consumer from having to care about matching nuts & sockets. The consumer value and disruptive potential of the Gator Grip is the direct result of delayed binding.

ThumLine Staff Notation
Like the kapoosh and Gator-Grip, Thumtronics’ new approach to displaying musical information delivers consumer value through the liberating effects of delayed binding.

In traditional staff notation, notes are “statically bound” to absolute pitches (frequencies). This “early binding” of notes to pitches makes on-the-fly transposition so difficult that it is the mark of a trained and seasoned professional.

ThumLine notation abstracts the notion of a “note” to a higher level by denoting “intervals relative to the tonic” rather than pitches. A song notated in ThumLine can be transposed to another key simply by changing the pitch associated with the tonic. ThumLine’s notes are “dynamically bound” to match specific pitches at the moment the tonic pitch is specified – at the time of composition, the time of publication, the time of rehearsal, or even the time of performance.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture (publication) to time of use is what makes ThumLine notation “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of ThumLine is an abstraction of the notion of “note” to a level which allows binding of note & pitch at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture (publication), liberating the consumer from having to care about transposition. The consumer value and disruptive potential of ThumLine is the direct result of delayed binding.

Conclusion
Those products which implement abstractions that liberate consumers through delayed binding are likely to be favored by the market.

I have not previously seen any discussion of the relationship between abstraction, delayed binding, and the creation of consumer value and disruptive potential. If you have, I would appreciate your bringing it to my attention.

The Log

Les Paul is often credited as being the inventor of the modern electric guitar (although the first patents for such instruments go back to the 1890's). His story is told in this article from the Washington Post.

Three facts about the invention of the electric guitar strike me as being particularly interesting.

First, at the time Les started tinkering with electrifying the guitar, it was associated with "singing cowboys," who were apparently presumed to be virgins.

• Moral: The guitar is not sexy; rock musicians are sexy, and their instruments are sexy by association.

Second, Les' first technically-successful electric guitar -- pickups & strings on a simple wooden 4x4 -- didn't impress the experienced musical instrument industry professionals at Gibson Guitar, who said that it was "nothing but a broomstick with a pickup on it." Such an instrument did not appear to deliver the tradition, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. that they expected musical instruments to have. So they waited TEN YEARS before manufacturing an electric guitar...and only then because Leo Fender, a musical instrument industry outsider, issued his electrics first.

• Moral: The likelihood of correctly identifying innovations which can disrupt a given industry is inversely proportional to expertise in that industry.

Third, the electric guitar retained the acoustic guitar's poor ergonomics; playing his own invention ruined Les' left hand.

• Moral: whereas acoustic instruments are designed to accommodate the needs of vibrating bodies (strings & columns of air), modern electronic instruments should be designed to accommodate the needs of human bodies.

One last point from the Washington Post article: Les said that in his quest for a fuller sound, before electrifying the guitar he "tried an accordion, and pitched it into the city dump," presumably unsatisfied with its timbre.

I wonder what he’d think of the Thummer? When it goes into production, I’ll be sure to send him one. :-)

Strategy Canvas

In a previous post, I mentioned Kim & Marbourgne’s 2002 book “Blue Ocean Strategy.” One of the tools introduced in their book is the “Strategy Canvas,” a graphical tool that makes it easier to compare & contrast the strategies of different firms or products.

Here’s the Strategy Canvas for the Thummer, comparing it to the keyboard & guitar:

Fig. 1: Strategy Canvas

Across the horizontal axis are characteristics of comparison & contrast, and the vertical axis provides the scale for comparing & contrasting them.

Tradition: To support the deepest Western traditions of tonality, Thumtronics is breaking the superficial traditions of musical instrument design, music theory, music notation, sound generation, etc. As the French might say, “C'est la vie – plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” – or, “such is life; the more things change, the more they stay the same” (to translate this phrase into today’s lingua franca). Hence Thumtronics will doubtless be perceived as threatening or devaluing tradition (as shown in the graphic above) despite the opposite being the case.

Craftsmanship: Craftsmanship is the manual labor of skilled workers. Such skilled labor is expensive; most people can’t afford it. I want to make the Thummer affordable by everyone –including everyone in the Third World, eventually – so I’d rather have Six Sigma quality standards on the automated manufacture of a cheap electronic instrument than the dubious benefits of craftsmanship.

Dedicated Repertoire: The pieces in a dedicated repertoire are specifically optimized to take advantage of the unique features of the instrument for which they were written. Consider for example the piano’s ability to glissando across the diatonic notes of C Major. That precise effect can’t be captured on any instrument other than the piano-style keyboard. The Thummer has the expressive power to develop innumerable unique musical effects such as the piano’s glissando, but because the Thummer is new, there are not yet any pieces written specifically for (i.e., dedicated to) the Thummer.

Dedicated Channel: This is the worldwide network of brick-and-mortar retail stores which sell music products exclusively or primarily. To sell a new musical instrument through this channel, Thumtronics would need to train salespeople to stand around in these stores demonstrating to passers-by how to play the instrument. This would be phenomenally expensive, which would require that the Thummer be phenomenally expensive, too. No new musical interface has ever survived the attempt to "cram" it through traditional retail this way. In its early low-volume days as a niche product, the Thummer needs a lower-cost distributipon channel: online direct sales, supplemented by customer-created music videos on YouTube, live performances, etc.. Once musicians have created sufficient demand among consumers, the Pocket Thummer can be sold through mass-market retailers, booksellers, and video game stores. Once a sufficiently-large installed based of Thummer-players exists, a high-status Thummer can be sold through the dedicated retail channel, because for such a high-status product, the dedicated channel's high service costs are perfectly warranted. But only then, not now.

Expressive Potential: The piano has one degree of freedom: key velocity (how hard you strike a key, basically), and a few binary foot-pedal switches (una corda, sostenuto, & sustain). The electric guitar has more degrees of freedom: string bending, the whammy bar, tone dials, effects pedals, etc. But the Thummer absolutely blows them away, with thumb-operated joysticks & motion sensors that offer ten degrees of freedom,, with the potential for more.

Creative Potential: When the piano-forte was new in the 1700’s, it enabled creative musicians to do things that had never been done before; so was the electric guitar when it was new in the 1950’s, and the keyboard synthesizer in the 1970’s. Since then, however, generations of musicians have dedicated themselves to exploring every novel possibility offered by those instruments. As a result, today there are no new musical effects unique to those instruments which have not already been beaten to death. Their creative potential is now zero. On the other hand, the Thummer is chock full of creative potential. Its unique expressive power, combined with the novel musical effects made possible by Dynamic Tuning (which only a Thummer can control) expand the framework of tonality, presenting a vast frontier of creative possibilities. Someday, after future generations of creative musicians have mapped out this new frontier, it too will be drained of all creative potential – so beat the rush! :-)

Success Rate: Of a hundred musical novices, how many will reach a level of competence that allows them to play music with and for their friends, to improvise confidently, and to write their own compositions for special occasions? That’s the level of musical competence that most music students seek, and would be satisfied with. But with traditional approaches to music education, the percentage of students who attain this level of success if pathetically low. It is Thumtronics’ primary objective to deliver the highest available success rate in music education. The Thummer note-layout and the ThumMusic System apparently have the potential to accomplish this objective.

Ease of Learning: Students will have a higher success rate when learning is easy than when it is hard. The combination of the Thummer (including the computer-keyboard-based QWERTY Thummer) and the ThumMusic System make music dramatically easier to learn, by exposing music’s underlying structure in a logical and systematic way. The piano and guitar don’t even come close.

Depth of Learning: Music students do not sacrifice depth to gain the Thummer’s ease of learning. The logical elegance of the Thummer and ThumMusic System not only make it easier to learn the basic concepts of music, but also to understand what would otherwise be considered to be “advanced concepts” in music theory. Traditional approaches to music education make these “advanced concepts” so difficult to understand that music students’ primary and secondary educations are focused almost entirely on performance, ignoring theory almost completely until the senior secondary or even tertiary (college) level. Even then, “music theory” is often presented not as a unifying theory of how music works, but rather as a long sequence of individual musical practices to be memorized. The Thummer and ThumMusic System can give students much greater depth of understanding, more easily.

Breadth of Learning: Music education today is focused very narrowly on 12-tone equal temperament, the tuning system that’s been in vogue most recently in the Western world. But other cultures use other tuning systems, and so did the West until quite recently. These tuning systems from other times and places are very difficult to teach, learn, and play using traditional Western instruments, but they are trivially easy to use on the Thummer and with the ThumMusic System. Just wiggle a joystick, and voila! You’re playing in the tunings of Pythagoras, Mersenne, Scarlatti, Handel, Bach, Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. Wiggle it a different way, and you can explore the tunings of Thailand, Indonesia, Arabia, Turkey, or Mandinka Africa. The Thummer and ThumMusic System offer an unparalleled breadth of learning.

Cheap to Acquire: All of this simplicity and power would be valueless if it were unaffordable. To make an impact on the world, Thumtronics’ products must be affordable. Thumtronics’ potential products run the gamut from the free QWERTY Thummer (a free software implementation of the Thummer’s note-pattern on a standard computer keyboard) through the Pocket Thummer (and economically-priced entry-level instrument for consumers) to the feature-packed eMotion Thummer – and even this high-end model is expected to be priced affordably. The key to “blue ocean strategy,” after all, is in offering a product that is (a) highly differentiated in ways that consumers value (b) at a low price, thereby delivering exceptional value to the consumer. Overprice your offering (as Apple did with its Macintosh computers) and you are just creating a market opportunity for your competitors (Microsoft Windows). This Thummer will always be affordable.

Cheap to Learn: The cost of any product includes its acquisition cost, its implementation cost, and its risk of failure. The risk of failure was addressed above in “Success Rate,” and cost of acquisition in “Cheap to Acquire.” Being “Cheap to Learn” embraces not only the success rate, but also the cost of that success. Thumtronics expects to provide free music lessons online to beginners, charging only for the intermediate and advanced lessons. Thumtronics can afford to do this by delivering its lessons primarily online, and by having these lessons be developed primarily by volunteer developers using open source methods. The student’s time is also a cost, but students should progress to a given level of competency much faster due to the ThumMusic System’s ease of learning, so the “time cost” of learning should also be lower. Finally, because the students’ can expect to succeed at a higher rate, fewer will experience the cost of failure, lowering its average cost per student. Every way you slice it, the Thummer will be cheaper to learn than any other musical instrument…without sacrificing depth or breadth.

Discussion
Thumtronics' product innovations and business strategy deliver a highly-differentiated "value innovation" to the mass market of non-musical consumers – exactly what is required to deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable sales growth.

Better

Potential investors often smile knowingly at me and say, “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Thummer is better than every other musical instrument available today. So what? Being ‘better’ really doesn’t matter. Entrenched standards are impossible to displace.”

Common sense tells us that this conclusion can’t be true, or we’d all be living in the Stone Age – so why does this urban legend persist?

One reason is that consumers and experts disagree on the definition of “better.” Consumers tend to prefer solutions that are cheap, simple, and powerful, in that order, but experts & specialists tend to prefer “power” alone. As a result, experts’ published reviews tend to rate the most powerful products as being “better” – yet consumers keep buying the cheap & simple stuff. This can create the impression that the “best” products aren’t winning in the marketplace, when really it’s just a disagreement over the metrics of better-ness.

Another reason the urban legend persists is that being “just a little bit better” is not enough. To quote W. Brian Arthur, a leading academic expert on the subject, a new product has to be “200 or 300 percent better than its predecessor before it can take over. Without that shift, the old product stays locked in. The best technology is not necessarily the winning one.”

That is, if your product is 10%, 20%, or even 50% cheaper, simpler, and more powerful than its competition, then it’s going to lose, because it’s not enough better. Your product has to be enough better to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and that requires being at least two or three times better.

But what if your product is, say, three times better than its competition in ways that were important to its potential consumers? Say, three times cheaper, three times simpler, and three times as powerful? If your product were that much better, in those ways then it would be the odds-on favorite to win.

That’s why I’m so excited about Thumtronics’ Thummer and ThumMusic System. They have the potential to make music-making three times simpler, three times cheaper (counting instrument & lesson costs), and three times as powerful (in terms of expressive potential and new tonal effects).

So if you’re trying to decide which innovations have the best chance of market success, don’t get trapped in the Stone Age. Use your common sense to see that being ‘better’ matters. It is one of the most important predictors of an innovation’s rate and extent of market acceptance, giving an innovation the potential to disrupt its industry and topple its market leaders.

[Note: The original version of this posting claimed that the Thummer was ten times better, not just three times better, which attracted comments that this was perhaps gilding a lily -- so I reduced the claim from ten to three. Underpromise & overdeliver, as they say.]