Guess What’s the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years
I think there are a few criteria to look at here, beyond the price of the new toys: the level of infrastructure for the device and the maturity/level of the quality during early adoption, among other barriers to adopt a new product. CDs, for example, represented a new format for music, but the quality was as good as it was going to get, and required no new infrastructure to deliver. Same for DVDs and video cassettes. Digital cameras did not deliver the quality to challenge film for quite a while — we had our Megapixel growth boom last decade — and the early cameras had other issues that detracted from the “film is free” advantage. Cell phones needed a network, and fax machines needed someone on the other end to fax to you — mass adoption required a critical mass.
Boom boxes? We already had tapes to play, no infrastructure was required, and the quality was pretty much as good as it would get. No hurdles to adoption.
That is one sexy looking boombox!
The one that somewhat surprises me is the answering machine – It offered a completely new capability instead of just a marginal improvement on an existing capability. (For example, if you already own a good cassette tape player then your music needs are already fairly well met, so maybe you can put off buying that new CD player for a few years.) Further, early answering machines worked pretty well, and required no infrastructure. So why are answering machines buried in the middle of the pack?
To Xittenn – That photo is of the character Radio Rahim from the early Spike Lee movie Do The Right Thing (1989). Mr. Rahim meets a bad end.
I would argue that the cell phone’s best marketing hook was fear. Businesspeople embraced it fairly quickly for practical reasons, but a large percentage of the general public got their first cell phones “for emergencies”. Once that justification was played up, embracing the technology was a foregone conclusion.
@Phi The cell phone only had 10% penetration after 7 years. I suspect it’s because only the big cities had reasonable coverage, and wider adoption slowly progressed until coverage reached a certain threshold.
@Emory I wonder how much the phone machine adoption depended on work demographics. Wikipedia tells me the first commercially successful answering machine was sold starting in 1960. Did a 60’s stereotypical family with one adult working and the other at home truly see a need for an answering machine? I’m guessing wider adoption came into play with the rise of working couples and more reliable recording technology.