How ASICS is moving past the TV/VCR Combo mindset
Ever since the phrase “It slices! It dices!” first bore its way into the heads of consumers in the early 60s, there has been a fascination with merging functions into a single, easy-to-use package. All manner of things have been brought together since that time, and as consumer technology began its frenetic acceleration in the 80s and ’90s, the ‘combo’ dominated shelves- both in the home and at your local Sears, with perhaps one of the most famous of combos from that era being the TV/VCR Combo.
In 1990, then-president George H.W. Bush joked in a speech to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: “By the year 2000, all Americans must be able to set the clocks on their VCRs”. It was a very of-the-moment joke, as the idea that VCRs were too complex for the average person was pretty well accepted at that time. In fact, there is a term for this, which is used in software design and engineering, called the ‘Blinking twelve problem’. It centers on the idea that the operations of something can be so complex that they get ignored entirely- leading to things like a VCR clock just never getting set. An additional layer of complexity was the new world of cabling and color-coded plugs that had to be set up between the TV and VCR in just the right way to get either to work correctly.
In the face of these obstacles, any household seeking to bring the wonder of ‘home theater’ to their own living rooms would probably see the TV/VCR combo as a no-brainer. And many did- to the tune of roughly a million units per year, at the not-insignificant cost of anywhere between $500 and $1,000, which would equate to roughly between $1,100 and $2,200 today. It’s easy to see how someone paying that amount would not expect to have to deal with anything more complex than hitting ‘play’.
Fast forwarding to the present day and we understand much better that technology moves in leaps and bounds, seemingly overnight at times. But the origin of that awareness began right when TV/VCRs were hitting their peak. Both the underlying technology and the manufacturing process supporting it began to improve dramatically, increasing the screen size and clarity of televisions while decreasing costs and media formatting, on the whole, began shifting from magnetic tape to discs- an ironic reversion back to the record form, but now with lasers!
Having perhaps recently made your sizable investment in a TV/VCR combo, you may have watched this progression with a sense of depressing frustration. By opting out of the complexity of owning both a TV and VCR as separate devices, you found yourself confronted by the inescapable tradeoffs. Although you might yearn for the bigger TVs that lined the walls of Best Buy or Circuit City, you couldn’t just buy one without having to contend with losing a VCR in the exchange. Worse yet, if the VCR portion of your combo had so thoroughly eaten a copy of ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ that both were destroyed completely (along with Blockbuster’s trust) you could not replace the VCR without also considering either a new TV or parking a new replacement VCR next to next to its dead predecessor as some kind of weird, space-wasting cautionary reminder.
Let’s summarize: In an era of emerging technologies, TV/VCR combos seemed like a great idea because they removed the complexity of having to learn to effectively use both things on their own, and how to make them work together. But as the technologies became less emergent and more mature, that initial choice to avoid complexity actually became far more of a (potentially expensive) hindrance than a benefit. This is because improvements in any specific aspect of the system had to account for the (potentially expensive) unavoidable dependency of the other merged aspects.
You could pretty easily replace ‘TV/VCR Combo’ with ‘eCommerce SaaS Platform’ these days and see an almost identical trajectory. For the last few years, massive do-it-all platforms have emerged, making it ‘easier’ to stand up your eCommerce channel by combining together product catalogs, user management, checkout, promotion engine, hosting, a storefront, and throwing in a search engine for good measure. Need a CRM? Well now they also can serve as an A/B testing tool, a personalization engine, and even handle all those pesky dashboard reports for you!
But as the technology matures, new tools are emerging that seek to be best-in-breed at a specific function, whether it be search, audience-building, A/B testing, or promotions. And with the increased usage and maturity of API-driven architectures, those (potentially expensive) tightly coupled monoliths are starting to look pretty underwhelming. With the collective growth of composable/headless commerce, it’s never been a better time to escape the combo!
At ASICS, we are on a journey to do precisely that, by moving aggressively and with speed towards a future where the best tools in the world are composed together into best-in-class digital experiences for our customers. It’s requiring us to learn new skills and re-evaluate how we think about our architecture, but we are embracing the complexity of the challenge because we know it will ensure our longer-term success. As a leader of our Software Engineering organization, it’s staggering to see the volume of new technologies and frameworks entering the picture, but I am also fortunate to have an incredible collection of architects and engineers on the team who are quickly assimilating these new parts into a powerful and comprehensive whole.
By internalizing the idea of accepting and owning the complexity on our end, we believe we will produce a better overall product for our customers. This will also provide us with a higher opportunity ceiling for improvement over time, and establish a roadmap that does not require us to repeatedly contend with underpowered, legacy, or baked-in dependencies. So- keep coming by the site! We can’t wait for you to see what we’re getting set up at our place. We’re making sure it’s going to be the best on the block for a good long time.
