After my blog post last week [URL="http://dpnow.com/forum2/blog.php?b=316"]championing the versatility of smartphones[/URL] compared to more specialised digital cameras, this morning I heard the reverse argument by chance on the BBC Radio 4 show, Start the Week, hosted by Andrew Marr.

In the show Marr and his guests debated the recent historical problems that have seen the western success of capitalism falter. Russian economist and political figure, Grigory Yavlinsky, thinks consumers are now being offered far more products that they don't actually need. One of his examples is, interestingly, the mobile phone. His argument is that a mobile phone should do just that, be a device for making phone calls. Yavlinsky asks why there has to be a camera in a mobile phone?

More fundamentally, Yavlinsky observes that originally manufacturers devised and produced products to satisfy a utilitiarian demand. The customer had a need and the market provided a solution. Today, he argues, manufacturers now widely operate on the principle of creating new consumer demand, producing products that many customers don't actually need. Manufacturers are trying to influence society rather than to serve society. "..in the sense that they change their places. Not the markets serving the people, but the people are serving the highest profits of the players in the markets."

Marr reflects that we seem to buy gadgets that need to be replaced and upgraded in no time at all, and wonders if this modern habit is what maintains economic growth. Another of Marr's guests, Diane Coyle OBE, an economist and former UK government adviser, reminds us that when mobile phones were first introduced they were taxed as luxury items and if someone hadn't invented them would we have discovered their usefulness to the extent that most people now have a mobile phone?

It's a sign of modern technology that products feature advanced technologies that many people will never use. Millions of smartphones are being manufactured with NFC (Near Field Communications), which enables your phone to communicate with another one by touching them together or to use the phone for payment by placing it against an NFC reader. Most of these phones will be long discarded by their owners before NFC services become widespread and be routinely used.

In one sense, it can be argued that these technologies are a huge waste. In fact, the microprocessor success story that is ARM, the CPU developed in the early 1980s by a small team of computer geeks at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, was designed on the premise that compared to other complex and feature rich microprocessors, the ARM chip would have much fewer features and the ones that were retained would be highly optimised to reduce cost and power consumption but deliver extremely higher performance where needed. Now, billions of devices, including most mobile phones, use the descendants of this chip.

But does this architecture based on simpler is better really work at the product level? In a sense manufacturers are learning for us. They have to take a gamble and integrate new technologies first and hope for the best. Without a critical mass of feature-enabled users the prospect for better services for us all in the future will, arguably, be severely limited.

And so what about cameras and photography? How many of us use features like face detection, Art filters, RAW files, PictBridge, movie modes, etc. Well, some of us do use some or even all of these features, but probably the majority don't.

On a personal note, while I completely abhor certain extreme aspects of capitalism, I admire and respect - and also enjoy - the impetus to innovate and improve that a market-based society and economy delivers. While I can see where Yavlinsky's argument comes from about why you can't buy a phone without a camera any more (you can, but it's a niche product), I for one think that the Swiss Army Knife mentality of product innovation is, mostly, the right way to go.