The customer is always right. Love your customers. The customer knows best.

We've all heard these old sayings. And to some extent they are right. Consumers vote with their wallets. They know what they want when they see it. The problem is when it comes to user input in the product development process the results are less than impressive.

Homer Simpson's long lost brother found that out the hard way in the Simpson's episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Herb the owner of Powell Motors goes bankrupt when he asks Homer to help design his very own dream car.

While re-reading a portion of "Competing for the Future" by Hamel & Prahalad, I ran across this sentence: "A company surrenders tomorrow's businesses when it gets better without getting different".

This has been on of the fundamental themes of my working life: keeping a firm grip on improving what we know how to do, while still being open and adventurous enough to do things completely different in and for the future. 

Whether we think about it on a daily basis or not, getting different is the ultimate goal we strive to achieve for clients. Going beyond helping them to be better to helping them become different.

One of the biggest drawbacks with electricity produced by windmills is that the price per Kw falls the harder and longer the wind blows. Since there is no way to regulate the output from windmills it would be nice to be able to somehow store the energy until prices are high enough.

This is an interesting design challenge as well as a huge business opportunity.

The price the electrical utilities pay per kW of electricity from windmills fluctuates considerably minute by minute. During peak loads the prices are higher, at night time the prices are lower. Power stations conserve energy by turning production down at night, (un)fortunately nobody can increase or decrease the wind to regulate the output of windmills. The consequence is that windmills sell a large portion of their output at very cheap rates.