Although Boomers have made major leaps in the way they understand and engage with technologies, let's face it: They'll never be (no offense, Boomers), as a whole, super tech-savvy (or at least as savvy as Gen Y and Gen We).
The NYTimes addresses this today, showing how companies are working to best service Boomers:
In the 1960s, baby boomers, like most young people, could not wait to leave home.
Today, those boomers are trying to figure out how to stay at home, even if they are past the age when their parents made the passage to senior living. Companies that have long profited from the transformation of the counterculture into the over-the-counter culture are creating products that they hope will help them do that.
Here is what you have to look forward to as you enter your 60s and 70s: deciphering conversations at cocktail parties becomes difficult; you cannot remember where you put your keys; and your grandchildren think you are a computer klutz.
Fortunately, technologies are appearing that can remedy some of these shortcomings, helping those in their 60s maintain their youthful self-images.
“The new market is old age,” said Joseph F. Coughlin, director of the AgeLab at M.I.T. “Baby boomers provide a perpetually youthful market.”They are, says Mr. Coughlin, himself a spry 47, “looking for technology to stay independent, engaged, well and vital.”
As most of them have finished rearing their children and paying for their education, they also have a lot of money, said Mr. Coughlin, and they are looking to spend it on technology.
The companies that are successfully marketing new technologies to older people are not those that have created high-tech ways for seniors to open jars. Rather, they are the ones that have learned to create products that span generations, providing style and utility to a range of age groups.
Are there any tools that you can think of that fit this description?