nuance intelligence

Bill Gail, a new acquaintance who runs strategy for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, is also the editor of the Geoscience Remote Sensing Society’s Private Sector Newsletter. He ran a great piece in this month’s issue, which I’ve excerpted here:

** 4. ACCURATE DATA VS USEFUL DATA – why accuracy is not always best
As scientists and engineers, we often assume that more accurate is always better than less accurate. For the end-users of information, this is not always true. Car navigation devices provide perhaps the best illustration of this issue. They show “notional” maps, in which the width of streets and their separation is less important than assisting with rapid visual recognition of where to go and which way to turn. In this, and in many similar situations, portraying something inaccurately can provide the user better knowledge than portraying it accurately. This phenomenon might be described as “objective inaccuracy”. Within the remote sensing industry there are many examples of objective inaccuracy – from the widespread use of ortho-projection imagery (a non-physical projection from a vantage point at infinity) to the well-known distortions of the Mercator map projection. In the end, all are engineered in an “objective” way to provide useful information rather than to preserve less-useful accuracy.

What’s the nuance? Web and software entrepreneurs (along with many other professionals) confront this compromise all the time.  And it’s easy to tell who’s running the show by observing the outcome.  Too many times in technology, engineers over-build a solution to manage every single case, when providing the simplest functionality is really what the market wants.  Apple is an interesting case of the inverse, where useful trumps accurate at every turn.

We are seeing this at the Colorado Capital Conference.  As the finalists are picked, the more nuanced differences begin to appear, and over-engineered solutions begin to lose out to useful applications that win the hearts and minds of customers and investors.