I’ve become frustrated with a lot of products and services lately and am making a declaration that the four core features that will make or break any experience is whether it’s fast, useful, simple and stable(FUSS).  Let me walk through some of my reasoning:

1) My internet connection – I’ve lived in my house for four years and have had three different ISP’s.  Cable, DSL and most recently have switched to Clear.  All I want is a stable 3-6 Mbps down and 1Mbps up(these are speeds of downloading and uploading information if you’re unaware).  I don’t want 25 Mbps at peak speeds if that means I have to live with sub-1 Mbps at other times.  I don’t want to constantly tweak my hardware and reset modems and check for signal strength.  I just want it to work as i’m told it’s supposed to.

2) Digg.com – This is a social news website i’ve been reading for five years to get tech and other news.  I go on and off with how often I visit the site, but I am a creature of habit and have been a loyal reader for a long time.  Recently they changed to a new version and the site is down almost every time I visit.  I’m going to get my news one way or another, in this case i’ve gravitated towards news.ycombinator.com and reddit.  As I said before, i’m a creature of habit and if these new sites are my new habit, Digg may have lost me permanently.

These two experiences recently have made me think about my laziness as a consumer and how quickly I will change direction if you don’t give me what I want.  I won’t even give the satisfaction of a text message breakup, I’ll just be gone.  I’m sure most other mainstream consumers are the same way as I see the same patterns when i’m the service provider.  Do you find that that FUSS is applicable to most products and services?  Is there anything that should be added or taken away?