Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers(helpscout.net) |
Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers(helpscout.net) |
From http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/apple-reveals-for-mon...
""Apple is famous for eschewing market research and focus groups during the creation of new products. However, it turns out the company does research consumer sentiment on existing products in order to optimize future designs.
Apple conducts detailed, quarterly iPhone buyer surveys, according to a joint motion regarding the sealing of trial exhibits. "The surveys reveal, country-by-country, the factors driving customers to buy Apple products versus competitive products such as Android," court documents state. The results break down which demographics are most satisfied with Apple’s products, and how different demographics respond to different features. The results also show how consumer preferences differ country to country.
Apple is asking the results of these surveys only be shown to the jury when proceedings begin next week. Language in the joint motion states, "Knowing what Apple thinks about its customer base preferences is extremely valuable to Apple competitors because it would allow them to infer what product features Apple is likely to offer next, when, and in what markets."
This is not antithetic: Apple is not surveying customers what they want next, but what is good or bad in the current products. Paraphrasing the Ford quote, Apple asks customers what they like and don't like with their current horses, not what kind of horses they want them to make next.
This is key to the "Don't ask customers what they want" argument (which is _not_ "Don't ask customers anything"): people don't know what they want, people have problems, and we are here to discover and solve those problems. Once faced with a properly designed solution, more often than not from the user point of view it will seem obvious in retrospect, so much so that it could be qualified as what they really wanted in the first place but didn't know they did.
> Can we stop perpetuating this myth please?
So the myth really is "Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers". He (Apple) did listen, but just ignored people telling him "I want this to work that way". Hence the shouts and tears when Apple regularly pushes new stuff down one's throat, bruising our hacker's analytical prides in the process.
The quotation is a concise and eloquent means of making a point about consumer opinion that is true in some cases, even if not in the historical case being exemplified. The historical accuracy is not important when it isn't integral to the argument being made.
I could make a similarly weak argument about your word choice: "quote" is a verb, "quotation" is a noun, but the use of "quote" as a noun is concise and communicates the intended meaning without causing any problems.
He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's Dilemma.
> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK
> for native apps on the iPhone.
Side note/question: I know there's three books in that "series": Innovator's Dilemma, Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next. For someone who has not read any of them, what's the correct order? Are all three required, or is there overlap between the contents?
Maybe I'm not using the correct words or my sight isn't accurate, but at least that's the legacy I got from his life.
Building something that makes you proud and you strongly believe it's the best. And convincing people to think about your product the way you do yourself.
This may have been a good or bad thing, according to taste.
1. Apple spent many decades innovating things that customers weren't that interested in. It's only within the last few years that Apple really captured the public's imagination.
2. You don't ask customers to tell you what revolutionary product they want, because 99.9999% of the time they can't even imagine it. Imagining it is YOUR job (provided you're in the business of carving out new industries). You DO, however, ask customers about products that already exist, once they've had time to get used to them.
Steve Jobs knew the difference. He (usually) listened when it was appropriate to listen.
Of course, focusing on both is the best approach. Personally, I've never gleaned the appeal of apple products. They don't seem simple or intuitive such as how they're sold, from my perspective. Maybe this is my advanced user perspective talking, but it seems like just another UI with a different terminology and tropes. A new interface to memorize. So from this perspective, the trick is getting users to want to invest time and money in that new system. In that, apple is quite successful.
That is pretty funny, obviously he didn't realize JC Penney is a completely different beast from Apple. People shop at JC Penney for price drops, not for quality products.
It was only after it launched that Jobs reversed himself and Apple came up with the idea of the App Store process to manage those fears.
If Apple really only started working on the public SDK and the App Store after consumers started buying iPhones, they did it at a superhuman speed.
And the App Store was just an extension of the iTunes Store. Adding a section to your existing online store in one year is not exactly breakneck speed.
A year later, things still felt pretty awkwardly rough.
"The Software Development Kit for iPhone OS was announced at the iPhone Software Roadmap event on March 6, 2008. [...] The App Store opened on July 10, 2008 via an update to iTunes. On July 11, the iPhone 3G was launched and came pre-loaded with iOS 2.0.1 with App Store support." [1]
"Android 1.0, the first commercial version of the software, was released on 23 September 2008." [2]
"The Android Market was announced by Google on 28 August 2008, and was made available to users on 22 October. Support for paid applications was introduced on 13 February 2009 for developers in the United States and the United Kingdom" [3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#Version...
The first commercial Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, went on sale on October 22, 2008. It had a small screen, a hardware keyboard, and a clunky UI reminiscent of Symbian. I doubt Android was on Apple's radar then, let alone back in 2007.