Does 1+1=1.5, 2, or 2.5?

By Bill Schweber, Executive Editor -- EDN, 4/13/2000

The recently announced merger of America Online (AOL) and Time Warner Inc ignited a lot of marketing and financial commentary. This phenomenon is not unusual; when a story this big is in the air, everyone who is anyone has something to say. In most cases, these pundits agree that the event is either a good or a bad thing, but usually a small, dissenting minority exists.

In this case, though, I find it interesting that the herdlike groupthink that usually follows such announcements is missing. The sages who comment on everything divide into roughly equal groups: those who think this merger is a good thing, those who think that it is a bad thing, and those who are undecided. The undecided group is especially refreshing because so many presumed experts in this era have no misgivings about confidently predicting how future events will unfold. It was interesting to watch the reaction of the stock market to the AOL/Time Warner announcement as the successive waves of analysts' opinions took hold: The respective stocks first went up for a few days and then down for a few more, and then both stocks became erratic.

I have no strong opinion about the technical, societal, or business implications of this merger. But people's mixed opinions about other mergers highlights that "more" may not be "better" for your customers. It's hard to determine in advance and with high confidence whether adding more functions to your product—or just blending two products—increases its perceived value. In many cases, combining two functions may actually be a negative to many users. There is no simple answer to the question.

You need to ask tough questions and do some soul-searching about what you can do versus what you should do. It's awfully attractive to add more features to your product by merging two disjointed devices—such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a cell phone—or add a capability to a device because doing so makes technical sense. Software-based functions are the easiest to add, of course, and that ease explains why we get word-processing programs that require gigabytes of memory and epitomize software bloat.

But the problem is not only in software. We all know that few something-for-nothing technical deals exist in a design. Although adding a PDA to a cell phone sounds like a great idea (because they can share a user-contact list, for example), processor loading, battery life, complexity to the user, and lack of independence between the functions adds cost. If anything goes wrong, everything is affected. In contrast, with separate PDAs and phones, one device can function when the other is unavailable.

I mean to neither target this cell-phone-and-PDA pairing nor suggest that these integrated devices are always bad. You should ask whether the combination or proposed additions are sufficiently attractive to justify implementing them or whether the compromises you have to make outweigh the presumed benefits. Try to consider realistic application situations and see whether the enhancements make a positive or negative difference to a real user (not you). Perhaps an alternative scheme, such as allowing the PDA to upload the most used 25 phone numbers into the cell-phone's speed-dial list, is a better idea.

This keep-it-simple-and-separate issue came into sharp focus for me last week when a cordless-telephone base unit in my house started to emit squawks and howls even when the phone handset was on-hook. I simply unplugged the unit's dc supply, waited a minute, and reconnected it. I lost use of only that phone—not my PC, radio, or TV. If the problem didn't clear itself when I repowered the base station, it wouldn't have been a wide-scale crisis, only a breakdown of inherently limited scope and aggravation.

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