If you haven’t completed your summer reading list, add this one: The Change Function by Pip Coburn. Pip was Global Technology Strategist at UBS from 1999 to 2005, and now runs his own firm, Coburn Ventures. To read an excerpt, click here.

The thesis of Pip’s book is this: most tech products fail because the total perceived pain of adoption by users is greater than the perceived crisis. The book provides investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in technology with a framework for looking at why certain products gain widespread acceptance and why others fail, despite the massive amount of R&D and marketing money spent to promote them. Pip illustrates how the Change Function works through various case studies (satellite radio, the satellite phone, and so on).

Pip has always been intrigued by change and by the reasons people adopt certain technologies and not others:

The implicit thinking that creating Andy Grove-style 10x disruptive technologies is an end in itself is not wrong but limited. By tolerating and accommodating pathetic success rates as opposed to examining the horrendous failure rates, the technology industry has generated numerous disservices, of which the primary one is as follows: Technology is widely hated by its users. The potential for technology to prove beneficial for everyone—from creator to investor to the vast bulk of the planet’s six billion residents—is currently being undermined . . . The Change Function aims to identify the root of crisis by getting in users’ heads as to what they really want—as opposed to running insightless focus groups—and it looks for ways of reducing the total perceived pain of adopting a new way of doing things. In other words,we want to understand the crisis at the adopter level, or specifically how a new offering solves a problem such that the pain in moving to a new technology is lower than the pain of staying in the status quo.

He is critical of the tech industry’s “build it and they will come” philosophy and asserts that one cannot rely solely on the supplier-centric model exemplified by the combination of Andy Grove’s Law of 10x disruptive technology and Moore’s Law, to predict whether a product will be a hit among users.

Pip’s book is a pleasure to read because it’s funny and irreverent. For anyone who has struggled with dozens of remote controls at home or wondered how to make a simple phone call on a smart phone, this book will make you wonder exactly why we have to live this way.

The book asks you to decide if tech is working for you:
• Are you tired of trying to remember power cords for business trips?
• Are you tired of trying to remember to charge your cell phone at night?
• Are you annoyed by your remote control—correction, are you annoyed by the seven remotes in your home because you can’t find the one you really want?
• Are you annoyed by complex alarm clocks in hotel rooms?
• Are you annoyed because your back hurts when traveling, perhaps because of all that extra junk you’re hauling with you in order to be connected?
• Does it stink when you don’t know how to align spacing in a Word document and spend your day guessing how to fix it?
• Are you tired ofbeing stuck on a helpline forever, bracing to hear a flurry of TechnoLatin when someone finally does answer?
• Are you annoyed when spell check Capitalizes words You don’t Want capitalized?
• Are you worried about your privacy?
• Do you have too many passwords?
• Do dropped cell phone calls annoy you just a tad?
• Did you ever have a flashing 12:00 on your VCR?

Pip blames most hardware and software product failures on the supplier-centric, Andy Grove mentality (“Tech Happens”) that pervades the technology industry in particular the obsession with more and more features. But why is this? .

My own take on why so many worthless products continue to be launched is that an entire machinery exists that must continue to be fed: executives, marketeers, engineers, salespeople, distributors, channel managers, offices in 20 countries, testing labs, etc. Then, there’s the stock market. The company has to report ever increasing profits every quarter. So it does not matter if they have completely run out of ideas. They MUST bring out a new product. And in the absence of any brilliant ideas about what users would find truly useful, they just clap on more features to the old product, get marketing to come up with a new ad campaign and hope that the stock price goes up high enough so everyone with vested stock options can cash out.

This is exactly the opposite philosophy of 37 Signals, a web design firm that produces software such as Basecamp, Ta-Da, Backpack, Campfire and Writeboard. For them, less is a competitive advantage (click here to read article). I recommend reading the 37 Signals blog and the book, Getting Real.