Why the greatest innovations do only one thing, but do it well

McDonald’s got rid of cutlery. Uber does not allow you to pre-book taxis. Amazon began by selling only books. Conventional logic would suggest that successful innovations are best when they allow you to do lots of things. Actually, if you want your innovation to change behaviour, it is often best to launch an innovation which does only one thing. It is much easier to adopt a new technology if its function is unambiguous. The device solves one simple problem, and solves it very well. If X then Y.

I have never had much luck with multi-purpose kitchen devices. Although theoretically they have a plethora of different uses, their application is so vague that you end up not using them at all. You may have a microwave which also contains a grill function. Have you used it more than twice? I doubt it.

The temptation is always there for manufacturers to add functionality to things — since conventional logic suggests that more must be better. What takes real genius is to leave things out.

Akio Morita (1921–1999) came from a Japanese family which had been involved in the production and sale of soy and miso sauce since the mid-17th century. With his business partner Masaru Ibuka, he founded Sony (as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company) in 1946.

Large magnetic tape recorders were the company’s first area of focus, later followed by the first fully transistorised pocket radio. But perhaps his greatest moment of genius involved the creation — almost from nowhere, as it seemed — of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the iPod. It is hard to remember how revolutionary this seemed at the time.

To anyone born after 1975 there is nothing outlandish about people walking around or sitting on a train wearing headphones. I was born in 1965. Let me assure you, in the 1970s this was a very odd behaviour indeed; analogous to the early days of cellphones in the late 1980s, when to use one in public carried a high risk of abuse.