13. Mass Customization is risky, especially in commercial environments. Buy something customized and fail; it's your fault. Buy something mass produced and fail; it can't be your fault because everyone else was doing it too.
Great point. It is a takeoff on the "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" bromide. I design physical products at my job and there is always a bit of nerves before the product hits the shelves. I imagine this is much worse if you are doing it on your own with no team or systems for support!
I wrote this as a comment on the blog at the link, but I thought I would note here as well:
<i>9. Customization is stressful</i>.
I would add that choice can actually make us less likely to make a decision rather than more likely to; I face this in all kinds of fields, including office equipment. In the last two weeks, I've spent vast amounts of time looking at phone and copier systems for <a href="http://blog.seliger.com>Seliger + Associates</a> and found the experience mostly enervating—and that's with a relatively small sample set!
Trying to not just evaluate a large number of products, but to customize them as well, isn't something I'm willing to do for anything save things that are important to me, like books. And the literature on this issue in fairly vast—see, for example, Daniel Gilbert's <i>Stumbling on Happiness</i>, Dan Ariely's <i>Predictably Irrational</i>, and Tim Harford's <i>The Logic of Life</i>.
Together, those might help explain some of the social issues with mass customization.
