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in several important ways.” Pogue’s conclusion? “The Z5, then, will not cause any discernible dip in iPod’s market share.”

While Pogue says the Z5 “deserves to be a hit for Samsung,” he also notes that he was unable to connect with the Rhapsody store and Windows Media Player. In short, the service failed—that is, the pieces did not work as an integrated system. That may be because they were conceived and developed individually, not together. The Z5’s service design was poorly coordinated, especially when compared with iPod’s service design.

Service design is the next important field of competition. Apple already has considerable experience, having built the i Tunes Store and tightly integrated it with i Tunes and iPod. Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book comes with Internet access built-in, thanks to a relationship with Sprint, so users can access Amazon from pretty much anywhere and buy a new book whenever they want— another example of well-thought-through service design.

Increasingly, organizations will compete on the quality of service design, with customers assuming (and demanding) high levels of manufacturing quality, product-design quality, and interaction-design quality.

Each of these learning curves represents a wave of knowledge and skills to be traversed by both individuals and the organizations that employ them. Each represents a new field of competition, a new strategy for differentiation. A new wave does not replace the one that came before; each new wave adds to those already here. Each wave sets a new standard for performance, “raising the bar” or “upping the ante,” in the metaphors of business. While professional focus changes, earlier skills are still necessary; they become “table stakes” as the game shifts and competition moves to a new field.

For many consumer-electronics makers, the changes represented by the learning curves for design can be difficult to negotiate. Successful firms typically have hardware engineering cultures. The quantitative basis of Six Sigma methods is relatively comfortable for engineers. Product design is less comfortable, but good exemplars have been around long enough for the discipline to get real traction. Also, the models that result from product-design exercises are tangible, easy to see, and can be evaluated quickly. Interaction design, however, is less tangible, and interfaces require

considerable time to evaluate. Also, software engineers often take a back seat to hardware engineers within hardware companies. Thus, interaction-design quality has only recently emerged as a goal for many firms, and proficiency remains low for most. Now a new field of competition, service design, is emerging. To suddenly find a need to think in terms of systems of products and networks of services, as well as interaction design, is doubly daunting to hardware companies. They may recognize the need on a rational level—and may even fund development efforts—but the move to service design represents a large cultural shift, one that may ultimately require a new generation of managers.

Difficult as it is, some hardware companies have begun the transition to services. IBM has spun off its PC division and is concentrating on services. Last year Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips spun off its chip division and purchased two health-care-services businesses. And just recently, HP announced plans to acquire EDS in order to bolster its services offering to more effectively compete with IBM. It’s also interesting to see software companies—Internet companies, really—like Google (fourth-largest maker of servers in the U.S. and Android mobile-platform author) and Amazon (maker of the Kindle electronic book reader) beginning to develop hardware platforms for delivering their services.

These changes suggest a need for both individual designers and the organizations that employ them to reassess what design skills are important in order to remain competitive. Organizations (and individuals too) must judge where to “play,” where to focus their energy. And they must gauge where they are on the learning curves of established design disciplines, while keeping watch for the emergence of new disciplines.

ABOUT ThE AUThOr Hugh Dubberly manages a consultancy focused on making services and software easier to use through interaction design and information design. As vice president he was responsible for design and production of Netscape’s Web services. He was at Apple for 10 years, where he managed graphic design and corporate identity and co-created the Knowledge Navigator series of videos. Dubberly also founded an interactive media department at Art Center and has taught at San Jose State, IIT/ID, and Stanford.