New Product Hype

I spent some time skiing with my daughter on her day off this weekend and we saw someone skiing on a pair of skis that were supposed to revolutionize the ski industry several years ago. With the advantage of passing time we can look back and say that the prediction turned out to be quite false. I remember thinking that I didn't see what all the fuss was about when the ski came on the market. So what went wrong.

I am a firm believer that those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it. There are a lot of products that we are told will revolutionize our lives. Sometimes the hype is warranted and other times it is not. With the case of this new ski design, it leveraged boat building technology to create a ski that floated better than other skis of the time. Skis and boats share a lot of manufacturing methods in that they both use fiberglass and sandwich construction for strength and to help save weight. Therefore it makes sense that a ski manufacturer would look to the boating industry when trying to come up with new design ideas. Sometimes the ideas work and other times they don't.

I have a pair of skis from the same era as this hyped ski but manufactured by another ski company. At the time, wide powder skis started gaining popularity. My pair of skis tend to sink in powder and so a design change would have helped it ski significantly better. One manufacturer came up with the very hyped design while all other manufacturers made a much more subtle change to achieve the same result. This subtle change is now used by all ski companies.

So what is the dead giveaway that a new technology is being over-hyped? For this ski, it came from non-skiing media sources. Ski magazine does a ski test every year and they gave this new ski some favorable marks. When I saw more general-purpose magazines and newspapers such as Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of this new ski, I began to wonder if it could live up to the hype. I learned from this experience that the source of the glowing recommendation should always be considered. I will never trust a ski recommendation from a general-purpose news magazine ever again unless there is significant support from ski industry trade journals as well. The same holds true for computer and technology announcements.