In February, I predicted a tepid response to the release of Apple Vision Pro. This was a contrarian view as Barron’s projected a $174 billion boost for Apple from AR/VR devices and Apple has a long track record of success introducing groundbreaking products such as the iPod, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple followed its playbook releasing a clearly superior AR/VR product after Meta, MagicLeap, and Google had tested the market with early versions over the past decade. Apple Vision Pro seemed poised to finally deliver on the promise of AR/VR first highlighted in Gartner’s Hype Cycle report in 2001.
The view seems clear six months later. Following disappointing sales of the Apple Vision Pro, Meta has reportedly killed plans to make a competing product, and Apple has suspended plans for a Vision Pro 2 to make a lower priced version that will compete with Meta Quest instead.
Though Apple Vision Pro has disappointed on sales, the product is a significant step forward and the future of AR/VR remains bright. When augmented by artificial intelligence, AR/VR promises to improve productivity and enrich our lives in many ways.
Yet the AR/VR industry is still searching for a product that wins widespread consumer adoption. Google Glass piqued nerd interest when first released in 2012 but served a limited audience. Early versions of Oculus Rift, now part of Meta Quest, were opaque and antisocial. Apple’s transparent lens offers a more inclusive, integrated experience with our surroundings. While AR/VR devices are narrowing in on key features, no firm has yet nailed it.
Lacking a Dominant Design, AR/VR devices are still Crossing the Chasm and remain on the Slope of Enlightenment in the Gartner Hype Cycle.
Dominant Design: Honing Product Market Fit with Customer Feedback
Dominant Design is a product management concept that identifies key features that must be included in a product to win customer acceptance. When the market settles on a Dominant Design, competitors and innovators must adopt those key features to gain significant customer traction. Dominant Design narrows product variation and emerging standards facilitate mass market adoption.
Two examples illustrate the importance of Dominant Design. The iPhone sealed the Dominant Design for the cell phone industry in 2007. Before its release, Nokia and Samsung produced a dozen or more feature phones each year of various shapes and sizes targeting niche markets. But the iPhone touchscreen delivered a superior customer experience and empowered app developers. Nokia and Samsung quickly fell in line and feature phones disappeared. Similarly, consumers struggled to use typewriters until the industry adopted the QWERTY keyboard in 1874. With a standard keypad, businesses adopted typewriters, typists emerged as a profession and the sale of typewriters exploded.
Introduced in 1975 by Utterback and Abernathy, Dominant Design is now common parlance among product managers. In Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, Utterback researched a dozen industries and observed a common set of product development stages that lead to Dominant Design:
1. Basic Research: Technology developed and validated, often in research labs.
2. Minimum Viable Product: Working prototype released to early adopters. User feedback informs product improvements. Working prototypes signal feasibility of the new technology to competitors.
3. General Release: Commercial product introduced broadly to customers. General release tests wider customer demand and spurs potential competitors to accelerate development.
4. Product Variation: Competing products emerge offering new features and form factors. Customer demand determines which features survive, may be discarded or must improve.
5. Dominant Design: Emerges with widespread customer adoption. Product stabilizes around common features that all competitors must adopt to gain broad customer traction. Product variation narrows facilitating user learning, habits and collateral assets to form around product.
6. Market Leaders: Growth accelerates around a Dominant Design. Industry leaders consolidate industry through process innovation. Variations appear to serve niche market segments.
7. Technology Breakpoints: New technologies spur a second wave of product development. New technologies force existing players to revisit Dominant Designs enabling a burst of improvement on existing technology. Old and new players compete for industry leadership.
Dominant Design: The Superhighway to Mass Adoption
Many charts show accelerating adoption of new technologies. Appendix 1 offers one example of those widely available on the Internet. Yet these charts begin only once Dominant Design is established. The path to Dominant Design is below the public radar, yet it is what consumes time, effort and capital for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Based on my review of Paradigm Shifting technologies, the path
to Dominant Design takes much longer than generally appreciated.
The table in Appendix 2 offers a longer perspective starting from technology inception to mass adoption. While exact dates may be debated, this exercise illustrates general product development and adoption patterns across Paradigm Shifting technologies. As Figure 1 illustrates, the time required for technology validation and product development is much longer than generally understood. But coalescing around a Dominant Design accelerates market adoption.
Figure 1: Development and Adoption Cycles for Selected Paradigm Shifting Technologies
New platform technologies adopted since 1950 have taken on average 24 years to go from Minimum Viable Product to Dominant Design. The time required to reach Dominant Design can vary widely ranging from ten to 34 years after a working prototype is released. Mobile phones took ten years for a smaller form factor that permitted widespread consumer adoption in the 1990s, while computers required 34 years while semiconductor technology matured to permit the transition from mainframes to personal computers in the early 1970s.
The path to Dominant Design is long and bumpy, but the road from there to mass market adoption is a paved superhighway. Among the new platform technologies adopted since 1950, just nine years were required to reach mass market adoption after Dominant Design, about a third of the time needed from working prototype to Dominant Design.
Dominant Designs are rarely recognized when they first appear and may only be discernible in retrospect. Nevertheless, firms that champion Dominant Design can establish market leadership by scaling operations around emerging standardized products. Dominant Design is a catalyst for several industry transitions:
1. Standardized Products: Dominant Design narrows product variation and promotes product standards. The value of incremental research and development declines.
2. Shift from Product to Process Innovation: Dominant Design frees resources to streamline processes that accelerate growth. Emerging leaders attract growth capital to scale the business. Dominant Design reduces product innovation but increases process innovation.
3. Collateral Assets: Standard products enable suppliers in the value chain to standardize their production and integrate seamlessly into the Dominant Design.
4. Crossing the Chasm: Standard products reduce costs for both suppliers and producers. Economies of scale follow, not lead to, Dominant Design. Lower prices increase demand and accelerate growth.
5. Industry Consolidation: As market leaders emerge, economies of scale force industry consolidation. The number of competing firms increases prior to Dominant Design and declines thereafter.
Dominant Design: Prospects for AR/VR Devices
Current AR/VR devices may dismay consumers and disappoint shareholders. In the annals of the Gartner Hype Cycle no technology has lasted longer or appeared more frequently. Yet longevity is a sign of durability. Technologies that survive the Trough of Disillusionment and reach the Slope of Enlightenment have a much higher success rate than those at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
AR/VR devices are still young. It has been twelve years since Google introduced their augmented reality glasses, which seems an eternity for eager consumers but just halfway along the bumpy path to Dominant Design for the average Platform Shifting technology.
As Yogi Berra once said, “predictions are hard, especially about the future.” Yet I can say with confidence that AR/VR will eventually fulfill and likely surpass our expectations. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the variety of product offerings until consumers coalesce around a Dominant Design.
Dominant Design: Related Concepts
The long, bumpy path to Dominant Design reinforces Lean Startup principles of starting with a Minimum Viable Product and Rapid Prototyping to improve product design and determine Must Have v. Nice to Have features based on customer feedback.
Dominant Design fits within the Product Lifecycle. Dominant Design is essential to Crossing the Chasm to an early majority of consumers.
Product Market Fit precedes Dominant Design but they are closely related. Product Market Fit signals the takeoff point for a company much as Dominant Design does for a market. The Flywheel starts spinning faster for the company and market. A Fast Follower strategy is tenable before Dominant Design, and First Mover Advantage is most pronounced thereafter. Product Led Growth and accelerated growth strategies are possible only after achieving Product Market Fit or Dominant Design.
Dominant Design is most salient for Disruptive Innovation, especially those involving Paradigm Shifts. The Gartner Hype Cycle shows that expectations for emerging technologies often get ahead of reality, but Amara’s Law suggests that we underestimate the long-term potential of a new technology even if we overestimate its near-term impact. This may very well be the case for AR/VR devices, but we may fully appreciate this in the decades to come.
Appendix 1: Adoption Cycles for Selected New Technologies — The Public Perspective
Appendix 2: Adoption Cycles for Selected New Technologies — Founder & Venture Perspective
Source: My research compiled from online and public industry resources.
