We're All Beta Testers Now
We're All Beta Testers Now
Companies keep attempting to force the future despite shoddy products.
In the summer of 2011, Microsoft was all-in on their new gaming doodad, the Kinect. The Kinect was inspired by the success of the Nintendo Wii, which came out in 2006 and was incredibly popular thanks in part to its motion-controlled gaming. Whereas previous games relied heavily on controller inputs, Wii games could use the controller itself to mimic real-life motions. People who had never considered playing a video game before were now picking up a Wii controller and playing Wii bowling or Wii tennis. Microsoft thought they had a massive untapped market of new gamers if they too could get in on motion-controlled gaming.
You don’t hear much about the Kinect today because it flopped. The price tag was too high, the demands on the consumers were too onerous (whereas a Wii controller typically worked in most spaces, the Kinect needed a big open living room to track your movements), its construction felt invasive (earlier iterations were said to be always on tracking your movements and listening to your voice), and for most games, it simply didn’t work as promised, especially since those games were primarily made for controller inputs. In the years following, Microsoft put less and less backing behind the Kinect until it was quietly killed off and the company returned to games that only needed controller inputs.
If there’s a sole redeeming quality about the Kinect, it’s that at least the market showed there was a tangible interest in motion-controlled gaming. Microsoft may have missed all the reasons the Wii was successful (cost, ease of use, etc.) but they weren’t wrong that consumers demonstrated a demand for this kind of product. That’s more than can be said for today’s line of flops that seem to force the future on consumers with no regard to whether or not there’s any interest in the product in the first place.
Who Is This Hotel For?
YouTuber Jenny Nicholson took the Internet by storm a couple of weeks ago with her four-hour video on why Walt Disney World’s Galactic Starcruiser flopped. While this may seem like a niche topic, it gets to the heart of the misbegotten thinking of one of our biggest companies. If Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars theme park, was a blaster misfire, then Galactic Starcruiser—a Star Wars-themed hotel—was a Death Star-level explosion. But at least the Death Star only had one weakness; Galactic Starcruiser seemed comprised entirely of small thermal exhaust vents that could blow up the main reactor.
Nicholson, a self-avowed fan of Star Wars, Disney parks, and theme hotels, would be the target audience for Galactic Starcruiser. The hotel’s big hook is that it made you part of a story. You’d arrive and then, through your interactions with cast members, get on a story track that would have you working with a smuggler, helping the Resistance (the story takes place during the Sequel Trilogy), or abetting the First Order. This “immersive” experience would cost visitors thousands of dollars simply to book a room. This is before airfare, travel to the hotel (Disney no longer runs the fantastic shuttle service from their hotels to the Orlando airport), food, merchandise, etc. As Nicholson calls it, this is the Spirit Airlines-ification of Disney Parks where costs get buried, and the nickel-and-diming of patrons only serves to further sour the experience.
Watching Nicholson’s video, it becomes painfully clear that Galactic Starcruiser, despite its massive pricetag (the cost of a stay for Nicholson and her sister alone cost over $6,000, which is roughly the same as the cost of the best room on the best Disney cruise ship will get you), was not remotely ready or even particularly well thought out. The hotel business needs constant demand to fill rooms, and it needs enough rooms to cover costs. Galactic Starcruiser only had 100 rooms, but there aren’t enough people in the world with thousands of dollars for a two-night stay at a Disney park to keep such an enterprise afloat, especially when competing with more affordably priced Disney hotels in the same area (as well as non-Disney hotels and AirBnbs).
The thinking seemed to be that “Well, it’s Star Wars, and we’re giving guests an “immersive experience,” so that’s worth the price,” except the Star Wars aspect never felt particularly well conceived, and the interactive element didn’t work properly. Watching Nicholson’s video, I was constantly reminded of the sleazy lawyer Gennaro from Jurassic Park, who tells Hammond, “And we can charge anything we want: $2,000 a day, $10,000 a day. And people will pay it.” When Hammond responds that he didn’t create the park just for the super-rich, Gennaro sheepishly replies, “We can have a coupon day.”
And look, Gennaro is obviously a weasel who deserves to die in the most humiliating way possible, but at least Hammond brought back dinosaurs. Charging about $3,000 per person to see an underpaid actor in a First Order uniform telling you to be on the lookout for Resistance members while you stay in a room that doesn’t even offer free Disney+ (you have to use your own account) feels exorbitant even for the biggest Star Wars fans. A big, Star Wars-themed hotel without the story element may have succeeded, and could likely charge more than other Disney hotels. But Disney instead chose to spend millions upon millions of dollars on a hotel they had to shutter in eighteen months because of course they did. They thought they were at the cutting edge, and that people would simply go along with this ploy, and instead, they’re now trying to figure out what to do with a big, empty hotel. No one really asked for Galactic Starcruiser, and it never seemed built to meet any particular demand.
What If Google Stopped Working
At least Galactic Starcruiser, while a black eye for Disney, doesn’t seem to be a trend across all theme parks. That’s more than I can say for A.I., which every company seems determined to foist on its customers even though it doesn’t seem to do anything particularly well other than crimes. Tomorrow at its annual WWDC, Apple will unveil how it plans to stuff A.I. into all of its devices with the promise of, “What if Siri actually worked?” even though that probably should have been answered when Siri rolled out 12 years ago.
Every company seems to be in a race with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in the generative AI race even though when you strip away the hype, you find that many of the company’s claims don’t hold water. Now that the crypto/NFT/blockchain/Web3 bubble has burst, Silicon Valley needs a fancy new toy that will supposedly change everything. And while Apple loves to tout how eco-friendly it is, I’m not sure how they’re going to reconcile that with a technology that uses as much energy as a small country.
And what does this transformative technology do? Well, Google used to be such an essential service in searching the web that its name became synonymous with online search. You could say, “Google it” and people would know what you mean. Now by cramming A.I. into their Search function, they’re getting results where Google Search tells you to eat glue and rocks. Keep in mind that all of this A.I. software runs on plagiarism, scraping other people’s work, being unable to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, and spitting back an answer that equally weights Bon Appétit and The Onion. It takes the energy consumption of a small country to return a wrong answer when Google previously had the power to return a correct answer at the top of its search results.
Breaking the Past to Sell a New Future
I’m sure the people behind Galactic Starcruiser and Google A.I. see themselves as bold innovators. They’re not going to rest on the laurels of the most successful theme park or the most successful search engines. That’s the past! Those profits are steady! That business model works! No, we need to be bold, and by “bold” we mean breaking a thing that worked and people liked in exchange for the promise of something that might work one day if we can get the numbers to shake out and remove all the bugs before it completely collapses.
What’s particularly galling is that despite Galactic Starcruiser and Google A.I. clearly not working or being close to a product that would meet the demands of the market, these massive companies sneeringly believe that we’re so loyal and dependent on them that we’ll simply take it on the chin and give them free feedback on how to make it better. We’re giving companies worth billions of dollars of free beta-testing so that they can perhaps improve a product they can then sell back to use based on our labor. I shudder to think at how many people ponied up thousands of dollars for a sub-par Disney experience just so Disney could learn that a ridiculously expensive hotel may have trouble staying afloat despite being Star Wars-themed. Google will likely get involved in a lawsuit at some point because their awful A.I. told someone to do something dangerous or illegal.
And to what end? How much money can you squeeze out of the average person? Part of the reason the Kinect failed is that Microsoft wanted users to pay $150 for the device on top of what they had already paid for their Xbox, which was required for the Kinect to work (compared to the consumer-friendly $250 for a Wii that already came bundled with Wii Sports). You were also asking people who bought an Xbox 360, which was made with traditional controller-based gaming in mind, to now switch to a different kind of gaming and assuming they would go along for the ride. The Kinect was never particularly amazing or came close to the popularity of the Wii, but it was “the future.”
What’s the plan here when a Disney park is too cost-prohibitive to enjoy? What happens when there’s a search company that consistently returns wrong answers? When is the moment that this all works better than the profitable and popular thing you had before? And how many unhappy customers will you have to throw at the problem to reach that undefined destination?