Market Research Gone Bad — How To Offer Less For More

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the bad-market-research dept

There are a number of places covering how the latest Treo 650 from PalmOne appears to handle memory poorly, such that it actually holds noticeably less data than the original Treo 600. What’s interesting about the story, however, is the reasoning from PalmOne as to why they decided to leave the low 32 megs of memory in the device, rather than increase it to 64. Apparently, they did some market research which said most users only wanted a few applications, so there was no reason to offer that much memory. What’s faulty about this reasoning is that it’s looking at past behavior. Here they are, offering an advanced device that should drive buyers to use more applications on it — especially since part of PalmOne’s hold on the market is the large developer community — and they’re intentionally limiting what people can do with the device because market research misread past behavior.