Not Being Sarkari

Recently, I visited a restaurant and ordered stuffed kulcha. It was accompanied by gravy and raita. When my food arrived, I found main product i.e. stuffed kulcha quite average whereas the accessories (in my case gravy and raita) were tasty. In fact good accessories did make up for an average product. But I was not satisfied. Reason was, I paid for product which turned out to be an average and I felt I have paid more than it deserved and hence my dissatisfaction.

So many times we have seen that companies try lot of gigs to move their average products. They come out with accessories to move their product which is unable entice consumers on its own. But so many times these gigs fail to lift average or poor product.

Microsoft's Windows Vista is one such example. Microsoft tried every trick in the book to push lousy, extremely complex and useless OS of theirs. But users continue to prefer Windows XP. They stopped support for XP so that users could shift to Vista. They bundled Vista with all new laptops/PC and laptop manufacturers started selling new ones only with Vista.  But they could not achieve success in making this poor product a successful one. Users prefer to continue with XP as it is difficult and painful for users to shift to Vista.

On the other hand we have iPod. An extremely good product which delivers both functional and emotional benefits to its users. It took music on-the-go to new level. With this successful product, huge economy of accessories is attached. Accessories of iPod (from docks to cases to chargers to some fancy fads) sells like a hot cake. In July 2008, market for iPod accessories was worth $1.8 billion.

In nutshell, accessories can take good product to new level of success. I doubt that vice-versa is true.