The biggest folly I am seeing in people and in business is concentrating on irrelevant things while failing to change important things so we are effective again.
I recently read an article in Bloomberg, for example, about how Coke, a major brand, is concerned that sales are dropping as people become more concerned about the effects of food they eat on their health. Coke’s focus then is on changing the size of the bottle and changing advertising, or buying competing brands, instead of changing their product so it is healthy. Would it kill them to use real sugar instead of the (cheaper) Type II Diabetes inducing Corn Sweetener?
Another current example is Microsoft with their Windows 8 product. They made the Windows 8 like a cell phone interface instead of a desktop interface. This works when a person is only consuming media on mobile devices but is extremely frustrating to use for real work on a desktop. Canonical went through this identical faux pas two years before Microsoft came out with Windows 8 — they removed the hierarchical menu and used only icons and a search box instead. The result was customers fleeing in droves — Ubuntu had been the #1 Linux distro, and a new distro (MINT Linux) was formed to take the #1 slot as Canonical fell to #2. But Microsoft did not learn from this and leave in a clear hierarchical menu but repeated Canonical’s error. Ask yourself how Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Surface Tablet sales are performing: then ask yourself if you would redesign a successful product to look and act like products rejected by the market.
People do this also, concentrating on how to prevent the loss of public assistance handouts instead of focusing on building their hard and soft work skills to be capable of supporting themselves.
It is all about continuing to do what we are comfortable with instead of adapting to accommodate the market. And the market is always right.