Waiting with Wow

While I’ve been finding that the Kindle’s instant delivery so I can start right away and the convenience of simply keeping my place has made reading books actually possible again, some materials aren’t available yet, so I ordered a few physical books, made of paper and everything, on Wednesday.

Estimated ship time: 10-14 days.

Got ’em Friday.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but in From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War (yep, on Kindle,) there’s an anecdote about a cake mix failing because, as it turned out, just adding water wasn’t enough “work” for housewives (the dominant customer at the time) to feel like they were making something of value. Reformulating the recipe so an egg had to be cracked increased repeat sales dramatically. Ditto an ointment for cuts and scratches, which needed alcohol added because medicine should sting.

Mixed with this, there’s a trend toward differentiation through exceptional service (witness Zappos, which, oh hey, Amazon now owns,) and I almost suspect that Amazon’s fudging the numbers a bit.  In fact, it’s quite possible that they invented the Kindle so people could get used to instant delivery, and any day now you’ll be able to get any book delivered within hours of ordering it.  Just you wait; it’ll be like pizza.

When employees or departments set purposely low goals so they can smash through them and earn big bonuses, there’s something not quite right about it, but when a publicly traded company does it, investors love them for it.

And now there’s Apple.  I think Steve Jobs’ health is fine, but if he didn’t take a leave, nobody would have believed that the iPad 2 is coming out this month.  I reckon the iPad 3, 4, and 5 are already in a vault somewhere, just waiting for our perception of an acceptable time for innovation to catch up.