I've owned a book for a long time on Sony called Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center. I like books that are a combination of story and technology and this one is fun for both its history and look at the work of Sony. It is now somewhat dates in that it was published in 1999 so there is none of the more recent work.

I went back to it as it had a description of how Sony reviewed the evolution of a product on the market: Sunrise to Noon to Sunset. The author goes through a number of stages they follow in their evolution (sunrise, early morning, late morning, noon, early afternoon, late afternoon, sunset, perpetual sunset). Here are three descriptions:

Sunrise  As a new technology is developed, the race to be "first to market" forces engineers and designers to release a product quickly, even if it is not optimized, too large and too expensive to attract any but the most curious (and well-heeled) customers - known as "early adopters." Like the first moments of daylight, the sunrise product is fresh and new....and fleeting. thus no more than a few thousand first-generation products are made as attention turns to the all-important second iteration. The race for market leadership has begun.

Noon  The "ultimate" version of a product achieves the essential goals in terms of product size, performance, price, product statement, functionality, relationship of the product to the media it contains, etc. Later versions may be finer, smaller, more expressive or elaborate, but when the day is done, the high noon design is often seen as the best.

Sunset  As the market becomes saturated and reaches its maximum size, differentiation approaches its logical end: as the number of product expressions increase, as internal mechanisms reach the ultimate in performance and low cost, the rate change from one iteration the net slows; "product inflation" causes each new design to mean less than the one that come before, which forces the designer to "create fireworks" in order to gain attention. Sophisticated products become useless marvels; "middle-of-the-road" search for innovative tricks; youth-, fashion- and sports-related lines materialize into ever more elaborate and culturally-specific expressions. Design is replaced by myth-making. Image overtakes reality.

In the book there are a number of examples. One was the Walkman which, if you are old enough to remember, was revolutionary but fairly clunky at initial release. Since we'd never seen it before it was magical. This was 1978. Noon, in 1983, was when we had the slimmer models where the cassette door was integrated in to the player. Very sleek. From here, you go in to a number of vertical markets and designed varieties that remained technically similar but had a distinct look to them. There were transparent models, models with wireless headsets, pink and blue ones, textured versions and those for joggers. Sunset is marked around 1997 with an obscene number of visual varieties marking what they would call perpetual sunset.

I've thinking lately about the "Web 2.0" application, whatever you may call it, and if software is also going to go through a similar consumer lifecycle as we learn to product more complex software, more quickly, and launch it in an almost disposable fashion (on-line). Email comes to mind for me. Though we may be a decade away, there is certainly a stance that our first email clients were basic, and at 'Sunrise' were amazingly convenient. Around Noon we reached a point where the convenience of reading and writing email had made e-communications ubiquitous. Now, are we on our way to a Sunset? There is room, as in physical products, for multiple variants to an email product. I work at Microsoft and would be lost internally with Outlook and the incredible functionality I use everyday, but I am also comfortable with Outlook Web Access and other on-line clients. My home email client Mail, also hooks to .Mac. Both have their place and usage.

I am wondering, ignoring the complexity today, if there will be a point in time that someone will product 15 versions of an email client, each tailor made to the person (vertical market) that might found it attractive. Would I care to own a more personal software statement for a critical application? Or, is it only in consumer software that I might find this useful (like pimping MySpace for fun)?

I'm not sure. Much depends on the ability to churn out releases of software safely, securely, and quickly. Different from a cassette player, the depth and complexity of modern software makes creation difficult. I see it getting easier for some software, but will we ever see an array of software varieties pre-pimped to my social standing, sex, shopping habit, color preference, location, language, religion...probably.