Lively Thought

Matt Burns writes a great piece over at CrunchGear on how Apple’s success is tied to the fact that it doesn’t confuse customers with too many choices.

There really aren’t that many products: One cellphone, four iPods, three notebooks, and three desktop computers. Now look at HP’s, Dell’s, or even Garmin and TomTom’s product lines. Apple does something different and hopefully others are taking notes.

Apple’s secret sauce: A simple product line.

This reminds me of a section in Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. Here is Christopher Caldwell writing about it in The New Yorker:

Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be “de-motivating.” In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.