The future of one button. David Mattin about why we oversaturated with technology

The Trendwatch.com portal has been publishing annual reports on key consumer trends of the future for more than ten years. The company's experts using a network of agents and analysts scattered around the world try to predict what the world will be, what will be fashionable tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow. Republic talked with the main analyst Trendwatching.com David Mattin about how technologies and the Internet change consumer behavior.

- The latest Trendwatching reports states that the consumer begins to get tired of an excess of technology and functions. Does this somehow affect the business of technological companies?

- I think this corrects their policy. Everyone begins to understand that there are more technologies than our everyday needs. You probably yourself notice that household appliances with fairly simple tasks began to more often suffer from redundancy of functions. Washing machines with countless wash modes, teapots with twenty cycles, vacuum cleaners with nozzles that may be needed only for cleaning in chemical laboratories, etc. These are examples of instruments from home life, in any other areas - from computer equipment to cars - the situation is similar.

It is clear why this is happening. The software has become very flexible and affordable, the components are cheaper and more diverse, and consumers have learned to live in the upgrade world. Adding functions and properties essentially to a standard product is an easy way for the manufacturer to respond to the demand for new and improved or at least a way to say that it is responsible for this demand. This allows the manufacturer to constantly overpower the same product with new properties and say that their product is new. Therefore, when we are talking about an excess of technology, then we are talking first about the desire to artificially complicate what works so well. In the very technological progress, of course, there are no minuses. It’s just that we see is often not progress, but a parody of it.

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