Well, clearly some tech has to have created new activities as opposed to basically being like old activities but more convenient. Why would consumer tech be different? To be clear, it does look like it in fact is.
I'm a little worried that anything could be shoehorned into "old activities but more convenient". Take for example the invention of writing, which may seem like a quintessential example of inventing new activities. But Cuneiform Inc. could've pitched it as 'like asking a human, but more convenient'. Surely we've stretched the definition too far by that point?
This leads me to my consumer tech example: videogames. Sure, you could call some of them "like board games but more convenient", but by the time you get to Legend of Zelda or even just Mario you have left the realm of merely making old stuff convenient. If VR counts as mainstream enough, it'd count too.
Perhaps it's that the stuff people want to do has overall been the same for longer than there've been humans: they want tasty food and drink, comfortable shelter, health, long life, socialization with close friends, sex with attractive mates, status, knowledge as a means and as an end, great art and stories and games; all with the least expenditure of time, resources, and effort. Generally, people are already getting some of what they want somehow, and making "new" innovation near the terminal value sources is harder than upping efficiency of previous steps. Here, "new" doesn't count merely making a new popular work of fiction unless it contains some idea or method ("technology") that gets duplicated elsewhere. It also means most things are not near that final step.
People definitely do start doing new activities, but they usually start doing new activities using the technologies they have. And then we create new technologies to allow those activities to be easy to do. I think it's rare to have a new activity that comes at the exact same time as a new product.
The first forms of writing were used mostly for accounting, which I expect was done in a less convenient way before. Then people gradually use the tool they already had to do new activities.
My way of conceptualizing this is "People are lazy, convenience is one of their strongest preferences"
Well, because reward-seeking inherently is maximizing gain while minimizing effort, the tendency to minimize cost is build into reward-seeking itself, it's not a preference, but an aspect of the mechanism which moves you towards that which you prefer.
Now, society might have pathological levels of short-term reward-seeking, preferring small investments with small rewards, resulting in quantity (slop, reels, short-form content) beating quality (depth, complex works, slow burn fiction). Another problem with this tendency is that it leads to reward-hacking, goodharting, hedonism, and the like, and that it conflicts with other valuable things (convenience vs security! People writing down passwords on stick-it notes). Even AI and its dangers are heavily related to this topic, AI is very convenient and most people may default to cognitive offloading, which makes them reliant on external tools as they lose the abilities they offload.
I think it's less that people are lazy and more that it's extremely hard to form new habits of behavior. People might be extremely hard working an diligent - but they will mostly be doing this by following well-worn habits.
Getting someone to do an entirely new things with an entirely new product is so hard that I'm not convinced it's even happened. Much easier for them to gradually evolve how they use existing products, and then you create a new product that allows them to do what they already do more easily.
I'd say that it is laziness, defined as minimizing the use of calories except when it serves survial. The reason it would be hard for me to get into running is because I have to convince my brain that this huge investment of energy is not a waste. Habits are things you've already decided are worth the investment, and when you get more used to things, they require less energy (A 3-hour drive you're used to might tire you about as much as a 1-hour drive you're not used to). Maybe you're too focused on the physical energy of tasks? Mental energy accounts for quite a lot, so even making choices is rather expensive. The mind prefers sameness because then it doesn't have to recalculate your daily tasks and their utility, it can just go along the usual flow.
Gathering momentum in any direction (e.g. developing a habit) does take a lot of effort, so I don't disagree, but I think it boils down to minimizing energetic cost in the end. The mind is also rather conservative (it resists change), so there's a sort of sunk-cost bias to calorie use a well. New things also contain a risk - so perhaps trust is another dimension when it comes to switching products. If you switch a friend out with a stranger, it would take time before the stranger became a friend as well, since there's trust and familiarity to be built
If you want to build a product that people will use, find something that people already do and make it less painful.
People are notoriously bad at knowing what they want. If you ask someone what they want then they will typically tell you what they think a socially virtuous person is expected to want. They will tell you that they want to eat healthier, understand people with different political opinions, know whether news stories are reliable, make more friends, be a better parent, and serve their community.
Silicon Valley is littered with the graves of products that tried to solve problems users said they wanted to solve. These products typically got enthusiastic responses when shown to users, and the developers were surprised to see them get little usage after they were launched.
In practice, the biggest sign that a user will use a product is that they already do the thing the product lets them do, and gain a clear benefit from doing so, but the current way they do it is painful.
Pretty much all successful consumer tech products succeeded by following this formula.
Original Facebook: Harvard students are looking at directories of people’s faces and names. This is great because they can find out the name of someone they met (particularly a member of the opposite sex). This is painful because you have to walk to the physical facebook to do it.
Facebook wall: Students are writing and reading messages or each other’s walls. This is great because they can see what others are up to and know when they might want to talk to someone. This is painful because you have to go to their dorm room and read the whiteboard outside their door.
Facebook news feed: Facebook users are periodically browsing through the most recent wall updates shared by all their friends. This is great because it lets them know what all their friends are up to and identify opportunities to socialize. This is painful because they have to manually click on each of their friends.
Original Twitter: Influential people are broadcasting messages to large numbers of followers. This is great because it allows a large group of people to know what is going on using their mobile phones, particularly during protests and events. This is painful because you have to set up broadcast SMS, or have a phone-tree where people manually forward messages.
Original WhatsApp: People with overseas relatives are using text messages to communicate with their families. This is great because they can stay in touch with family members, including people who have old feature phones, or limited internet. This is painful because cell phone providers charge lots of money for messages.
Original SnapChat: Teenagers are communicating with their friends by sending them selfies (some of them sexual). This is great because it gives a sense of being “present” with that person, and is less effort than typing a message. This is painful because sometimes people hold onto those selfies and later use them to mock that person after they have fallen out.
Uber: City dwellers are using their phones to arrange for a car to pick them up and drive them somewhere. This is great because it lets them get around a city without having to own or park a car. It is painful because they have to talk to a human to explain where they are, and it’s hard to know whether a car will come soon enough for booking it to be worth it.
DoorDash: Busy professionals and working parents are ordering food delivery from restaurants. This is great because they can get food without the hassle of having to go to a restaurant. This is painful because only a few restaurants (e.g. Pizza) get enough delivery demand to provide delivery services.
Craigslist: People are using email mailing lists to advertise used products they want to sell. This is great because it allows buyers to make money for unwanted items and buyers to get things for cheap. This is painful because the email becomes hard to read when lots of things are being given away, and you can’t tell whether a product has already been taken.
AirBnb: Attendees of large events are coordinating to find people whose houses they can crash at. This is great because it allows people to find a place to stay even when all hotels are booked up. This is painful because it is hard for hosts or guests to know if they can trust each other.
Original Amazon: People are getting niche books delivered to them from large bookstores outside of their town. This is great because you can get books that aren’t available in your local bookstore. This is painful because you often have to call multiple book stores to find one that has the book you want.
Slack: Employees at a company are communicating by sending live messages to multiple shared channels. This is great because you can see what is going on live and enter and leave channels based on what you are doing. This is painful because it is typically done using IRC, which is hard to set up and locks modern chat features.
Substack: Industry experts are sharing information with followers using paid email newsletters. This is great because it allows subscribers to get high quality niche information that social media wouldn’t distribute, and allows authors to make enough money to keep doing it. This is painful because you have to cobble together existing services to make it work.
Each of these follows the same pattern of “[People type] are doing [action]. This is great because [benefit]. This is painful because [cost].”.
Can you think of any successful consumer tech products or successful feature launches that didn’t follow this formula? My guess is that there aren’t any.