The Holy Grail of Tech

This post originally appeared in the author’s blog @ fiveshotsofcoffee.com on 25th August 2021.

This short post is a forerunner to my next blog post about Apple & its ecosystem.

More than a decade ago, when I was a student of Medicine, I heard a story about a small piece of technology which blew my mind. A story narrated in our class by the guest speaker - a renowed Ear surgeon.

It’s a story about an underprivileged kid, who was born deaf. Until she was 4 or 5 years old, she never heard a word from others, nor a sound from this world. Now and then, she woke up from her sleep crying, but the cries were heard by everyone else but her. Help came for her and her parents, in the form of a non-profit organisation, which funded her to get a expensive but wonderful piece of technology called Cochlear Implant.

If I remember correctly, the Implant has two parts - a part which has to be surgically fit inside your ear, and another part which sits outside your ear (like a Hearing aid) and transmits the sounds to the inner part. The device was pretty expensive then and there used to be a waiting list for the procedure. The girl finally got the procedure done, and to the delight of her parents it was a grand success. The implant worked flawless, and the girl could hear every single wave of sound that reached her.

When the parents came back to the surgeon for followup, they shared one interesting observation with him, which blew his mind then. Now and then, the girl did wake up from sleep crying, like before. Only now, she woke up, groped the bedside table for her Implant’s headpiece (the outside part), inserted it behind her ear, and then, and only then she started crying.

The speaker surgeon was stunned then, and so was I & the rest of the audience while listening to the story. In a short period, that piece of technology became her Second Nature, almost a part of her physiology, her body, that even when doing something like an involuntary or a subconscious act like waking up from sleep crying, she reflexively finds and inserts it even before she starts crying.

I had long forgotten this story, and it suddenly came to my mind when I was collecting my thoughts for a blog post about Apple.

I think the Holy Grail of Technology is when that Tech becomes the User’s Second Nature. His or Her’s Reflex. His or Her’s De-facto. It is at that point, they stop looking around, stop looking for alternatives, for the reason that they would then be replacing a part of themselves.

Creators or Companies who realise this and focus on becoming their target audience’s Second Nature, do very well for themselves.

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