When Henry Ford began mass producing the Model T Ford he famously said “the customer can have any colour he wants, so long as it’s black”.
In the early days of personal computing and mobile phones, manufacturers, including Apple, IBM and Motorola adopted similarly inflexible policies. They believed, perhaps, that the new technologies were exciting enough to sell themselves. It is only in the last few years that most PC and mobile phone makers have broken out of the design straitjacket and begun to pay attention to consumer fashions and trends.
