Book Excerpt September 3, 2010, 4:00PM EST

Book Excerpt: Trade-Off

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There's an old cliché in business that people don't buy a quarter-inch drill—they buy a quarter-inch hole. The drill happens to be the best means to an end, but if there were a better means, people would buy it. They don't give a hoot about the drill. They want the hole it makes. The same kind of saying can apply to vacuum cleaners. People don't buy a vacuum cleaner—they buy a clean floor. But for decades the only way to get a clean floor had been to push a vacuum cleaner over it.

Watch the Roomba Do Its Job

In the fall of 2002, iRobot introduced the Roomba vacuum cleaner. For the first time in ages, someone had come up with an innovative way to get a clean floor—a leap in convenience. The round, low Roomba looked more like a cross between a bathroom scale and a Belgian waffle iron than a traditional vacuum. It came armed with a computer, sensors, and AI that could help it figure out the size and shape of a room and how to make sure every inch got cleaned. It worked entirely on its own—you'd set the Roomba down on a floor, turn it on, and it would beep and whir and do the vacuuming job with no human intervention. In marketing campaigns, the company talked up Roomba's suction power and array of tiny brushes, claiming it would do as good a job as any vacuum in its price range. The company was trying to enter the $200 vacuum-cleaner market at about the same fidelity as its competitors, but with a significant jump in convenience. Buy a Roomba, the pitch went, and you'll get the same clean floor in a much easier way for the same cost.

That 2002 holiday season—while the economy was muted by the tech bust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—Roomba took off. Within two years, iRobot sold 2 million Roomba vacuums. That's from a standing start, with no experience selling to retailers, no distribution channel, and zero brand recognition. The company brought an innovation in convenience into a mature sector—and used it to win customers from the cluster of competitors.

Now iRobot plans to develop robots to do other kinds of housework. "If we can get that magical value-vs.-cost equation as good or better than the current situation, we will build that product," Angle said. "We believe many tasks within the home are ripe for automation." In the future, iRobot's formula will be to match conventional products on fidelity and cost and then use robotics to gain the upper hand in convenience.

Business bookshelves are filled with titles about innovation, and often they're about how companies can come up with cool new ideas. The fidelity/convenience swap is a way to put those ideas in context and see what they might do for a product or service in an overall marketplace.

It can also help a company see why and how competitors are putting on pressure and facilitate ideas about how to respond. Is the competitive pressure coming from the convenience side or the fidelity side? And what is the best response? Do you fight convenience with even greater convenience? Or by moving up in fidelity? The answer can vary depending on the brand, the industry, and surrounding conditions. Analyzing the fidelity/convenience trade-offs can help tease out options.

Maney is an author and journalist who has covered technology for more than 20 years. His previous book was The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM.