Intimacy or Efficiency?

We talked, in class Tuesday, about intimacy and efficiency. Clearly both provide great advantages and both are quite important. However, given the opportunity to choose one of the above, as the exercise in class prompted, I would choose intimacy. Many in class chose this option and, no doubt, many would agree with my point. Nonetheless, I think the semantics were largely misinterpretted in class. Efficiency seemed to be interpreted as manufacturing efficiency or some sort of efficiency that saves the target firm money. Also, it seemed that intimacy was interpretted as a strong relationship between sales person and customer. Rather, I think these terms can be interpretted in a much more philosophical fashion.

Intimacy can manifest itself not only as the likability of sales rep or company, but also as a long-standing relationship creating peace of mind for the customer. For example, many companies worry about downtime with IT solutions and are very unlikely to switch from one firm to another when a reliable vendor is found.

I think the best example of this phenomenon was the Qwerty keyboard. A new keyboard was created proved that it was significantly more efficient - it promoted much higher typing speeds and more intuitive use. Nevertheless, it failed because the Qwerty keyboard had established itself as the standard - there was a certain intimacy with the keyboard because people knew how to use it. Intimacy won, at the end of the day - and I would place my bet on intimacy almost every time.