The Three Most Important Consumer Products Of 2010

The past year has been an unusual one for the consumer tech industry. In an era when the staples of the industry — the TV set and the PC — were relatively mature and incapable of generating new growth, three innovative products came from nowhere to drive new consumer spending and alter their respective industries. But the story of these three products — the iPad, the Kindle, and Kinect for Xbox 360 — is not just a story of successful product launches. Instead, these three products have benefited from permanent changes in the way consumers interact with innovative consumer products, rewriting the rules of product strategy. If product strategists learn the lessons taught by these three benchmark products, they have a fighting chance of following in their footsteps in the decade to come.