Strange Loops

And which products are you referring to? The iPhone is arguably a “best of both worlds” combining a music player and a smart phone. To be fair, one could assume that Apple did indeed know enough about each category of product, and they did know what they were trying to accomplish. Furthermore, there's still a vibrant market for portable music players and non-smartphones (although Apple does not make any examples of the latter), showing there's room for both product A, product B and product A+B. Without specific counter-examples to illustrate your point, I think you're being unfairly cynical.

David,

The iPhone wouldn't be product A+B, it's Product C. An example of Product A+B would be an old Treo or Windows Mobile product. Those products are clearly PDAs w/ phones slapped in them. Conversely, phones with PDAs functions jammed into them are another example. That's an example of the best of both worlds fallacy I mentioned above.

I see your point. I apologize for being picky but in your initial entry, you mentioned “products (or processes, etc)…” and I assumed you were referring to entire categories of such. As both the Treo and the iPhone demonstrate, there will always be hits and misses in any industry that relies on evolutionary innovation. Changing the subject slightly, I too would be skeptical if someone advocated marrying the classic Waterfall software development methodology with rapid prototyping, or sports drink bottle labels with e Ink readers. There are some categories however that do encourage convergence. I would love to see a follow up blog post along the lines of “don't merge AB testing with focused (individualized) usability testing because those two worlds don't really overlap and shouldn't be combined because…”

David,

Right, your point about waterfall / rapid prototyping is what I'm speaking to. I've just found that when people use the exact phrase 'best of both worlds', they're usually just picking and choosing what gets shoehorned together rather than using it as input to create something new. Another example is people taking the wii controller design and throwing out adaptors for every gaming system out there. Or, along those lines, companies that take old games and add wii controls to them, thus ensuring a horrible user experience.

People should absorb the best of something and used that as influence for something else. That's where convergence and evolution are really at their best.