Product Development

FractalFluff, March 11, 2014; 09:32 / FB 19073
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(Implied fluffy misery. Graphic abuse levels minimal; abustas may require supplementation. Trigger warning for survivours of Asshole Boss Affliction.)

Product Development

"...And so," the head of Product Development (UK Division) was saying, "we'll be winding up the Tuffy-Nuff Fluff project effective immediately. Instead, we're going back to basics and refocusing on our core market: girls. Yes, demographics have changed. Yes, people have less disposable income than they once did. But little girls are still little girls, and they still love ponies! Ha, ha, ha. We're confident that we can generate enough fresh engagement with HasBio's Fluffy Pony line that we don't need to dilute our brand identity by associating it with violence and aggression..."

You sit back in your chair and let Johnson witter over his PowerPoint3D holo-presentation unencumbered by your attention. It's the same guff you've been hearing from the top floor of Product Development ever since this jackwagon took over from Harris: return to core values, mustn't do anything to sully our lovely fluffy brand identity with anything unfeminine.

Never mind the increasingly urgent need to re-take the ground we're rapidly losing to things like PocketPredator and iDragon. Never mind the metric fuckload of resources that have already been devoted to the "fluffies for boys" concept, never mind the overwhelmingly positive response from your consumer research initiatives; never mind the year and a half of hard work that had gone into it. Let's scrap the whole idea and go back to offering the same old crap that people have been turning their noses up at for years. Let's work on "broadening our appeal within the core demographic" and "letting parents know we share their dreams for their daughters." Good grief.

Even that wouldn't be so bad, but the brain-farts that he and his hand-picked Vice-Chair laughingly termed ideas were so achingly hackneyed and so painfully half-baked, it made your eyes water. Let's add value by making fluffies and their accessories more educational! Let's create ponies that can be useful around the home!

Oh, sure, there were ways to salvage even those clunkers — none of which anyone could possibly enact in the face of constant interference from the kind of people who thought that calling cookery lessons "domestic science" was the zenith of effective rebranding.

(For the love of God, you'd frequently heard the pair of them describe certain of the Mane 6 as excessively butch. The mind boggled.)

So far, their input into the "educational fluffy" concept had been a kind of backpack/pencil case thing for the fluffy to wear like a saddle; and a couple of fluffy-themed, plush-covered Speak'n'Spell rip-offs.

You tried to point out to them that since an entry-level tablet now cost slightly less than a frozen pizza and could be used to play literally thousands of games, single-purpose electronic toys were about as popular as slide-rules.

Their response had been the addition of fluffy bio-circuitry for some of the processing and human-interactive elements. The Fluff'n'Learn would be able to recognize its users from their biometrics, build up a profile, and adjust its responses according to the users' input. Instead of drawing its questions from a finite pool that would inevitably become repetitive, the Fluff'n'Learn's bio-circuitry would be able to come up with brand new questions derived from a set of programmed parameters.

You immediately saw several problems with this approach, not least along the ethical dimension. "Bio-circuitry" was what Product Development called fluffy pony brain tissue.

They'd even made a prototype.

You still have nightmares about it.

And the ones that followed, as they tried to "tweak" the hopeless device into salability.

In meeting after meeting, you tried to point out that even if you could get people interested in a Speak'n'Spell rip-off covered in uncomfortably warm, pulsating fluff , questions like "speww 'weggies'!" or "take 'way fwee fwom sevving!" were unlikely to provide much forward momentum to a developing intellect, especially when the game's own answer was generally "Nu wowwy, fwend. Fwuffy nu knoh eefuh." You ventured to suggest that could only be said to be educational if the topic at hand was "just how stupid we think our customers are".

You further pointed out that some of the questions the bio-circuitry was throwing up (such as "Wat cowwah Mummah's eyesies? Fwuffy fowgettin efwyfin, nu wan fowget Mummah...") might be of limited relevance to most consumers. You observed that excursions into philosophical topics such as "How time tiww howme an Mummah?", "Wy efwyfin stiww dawk?" and "Wy am Fwuffy suu cowd... suu vewwy cowd..?" might be somewhat advanced for the core demographic. You noted that most kids didn't start Introductory Existential Horror until at least middle-school. Not formal lessons, anyway.

You brought up the matter of the Biometric Scanning Port. Finger, you pointed out. Orifice, you spluttered. Ages four and up, you emphasised, and really? Really? Really?

Johnson's only response was the smirking "Oh, you!" look that served him in place of reasonable engagement...

...But the next prototype had a round patch of bare... you didn't want to call it skin... in place of the disturbingly peristaltic port. There was also a new interface component: a large, friendly button marked "Huggies!" When pressed, it would give the bio-circuitry a dose of endorphins and fluffy-specific opiod analogues.

When the device was passed to you, you surreptitiously wedged the button down. The prototype stopped asking you to "spell 'Mummah'... huuhuuhuuhuu..." and just giggled quietly for a while, before murmuring "speww... 'wawa'..." and falling silent forever.

Fluffy pony drowned. In dope.

That was the day you bought the gun. You weren't going to actually DO anything. You just didn't want to feel so terribly alone.

And now they were officially shitcanning the Tuffy-Nuff Fluff line, aka "the only credible product on the drawing-board, which could be the saving of us if only these muppets don't shitcan it." A fluffy designed specifically to appeal to boys, the Tuffy-Nuff project had been old Harris' baby. That was probably this new twerp's real motivation for torpedoing it; that, and the kind of mentality that found Applejack a little too unrefined.

Faster, more muscular, with more length of bone and a blockier silhouette than the typical fluffy, the T.N. types were based on a beefed-up version of the old Big Mac configuration. They were less sheep-pig-hamster and more Clydesdale-razorback-pitbull — to look at, at least. Under the new chassis they were still fluffies qua fluffies, of course. The T.N.s would retain the loyalty, empathy and desire for the society of others that made quality fluffies so enticing, but expressed in a less clingy and irritating way. Moderately elevated intelligence and improved memory would make them a more interesting companion, while a carefully-selected fluff palette would make them less embarrassing to be seen with. Out went pistachio, primrose yellow and bubblegum pink; in came bronze, rust brown, silver grey, steel blue, fire-engine red, and a rather unusual camouflage pinto.

Instead of the design-by-committee approach that had given the world fluffsplosions, sorry poopies and that thing in Cleveland, Harris had pretty much turned the whole thing over to one man: Clarence Hardiman, a brilliant if pathologically prissy and self-regarding geneticist. Hardiman had picked his team based on competence rather than social connections ("I don't do friends," as he put it, pronouncing the final word with the kind of distaste usually reserved for internal parasites). Motivated by generous pay, lots of perks, and the fact that they wouldn't have to work with Hardiman anymore once the project was finished, the team had a litter of T.N. 1.0s trotting around inside of six months.

The last batch to mature, T.N.1.3, were nearly up to spec, and the surrogates carrying T.N. 1.4 had foaled a couple of weeks back; Hardiman had been raving about one particular filly in a way that made him seem almost human.

You'd encountered some of the T.N.s from time to time as their handlers walked them in the grounds or took them to presentations: reserved and laconic by fluffy standards, instinctively putting themselves between strangers and their humans, quietly studying their surroundings instead of trying to eat power cables or crapping on the carpet. You'd rather liked them. Now Upstairs were probably going to demand that the whole lot were euthanized and incinerated to safeguard their intellectual property. There'd be nothing left of the sturdy, resourceful fluffies but ash and a few frozen tissue samples.

Poor old Hardiman. This is going to kill him.

***