Re: PermissionDog?
You've hit on two crucial elements of a products value.
- There is nearly limitless room for products that all do the same thing. Unless you're comparing two or more vastly different things, or you have very specialized requirements, customer perception is always more important than the specs/capabilities of a particular product in that family. The GREEN thing and the MAGENTA thing are 100% alike except for their color and their logos, but some customers will convince themselves one has better (x).
In a professional field you'll generally find that to be different, more grounded. But general consumers are their own worst nightmare of a salesperson. You can be the designer & engineer of a thing and people will tell you how great the (feature) is, except you didn't put that feature in there. They're either lying, or have no idea what those words mean. The latter is generally the case.
- The better explanations thing is all about customer education, and you jump right off into intensely deep and philosophical outlooks on educating, not educating, deceiving and outright lying to customers. I'm strongly in the 'tell them the absolute truth, then charge about 2.7 wheelbarrows full of cash more than it cost you to make it' camp. It's an odd thing, but people who pay lots and lots for something tend to take better care of it and complain only if there's a legitimate problem. Bargain hunters are the opposite, they have unrealistic expectations and just complain non stop.
But that's just my view. One if the best places, I believe, to study the philosophies of customer education is the US Food and Drug Administration website. All the letters and conversations about full disclosure in Rx meds are open and it's really, really interesting how different people view customer education and those views translate directly from meds to toys to consumer electronics.
But I agree, better definitions are needed for permissions.