11–20 of 81 posts
He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt produce anything useful, except when you are looking for flaws in your product.
Nonsense - if it wasn't for focus groups we wouldn't have been able to launch our new car with improved whip holder!
What Apple has executed is actualy mass luxury. Its goods are perceived as high value objects, where status is more important than breadth of functionality (more on this later). Perception is very important. For instance, a discount store would stack up items and use cheap-looking layout to create the perception that they are cost cutters. Similarly, a luxury item should be perceived as objet d' art where functionali…
So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that probably everyone thinks is useless (or at least only marginally useful), and yet to have to stay focussed on the problem(s) you are addressing and take care to address them cleanly and with style.
It is actually in those places where others cannot see that some of the best ideas can be brought to fruition. Of course releasing too early can lead to disaster (ask the Color folks on that one, at least I perceived it as a PR disaster).
First, the company is quite old (1889, I believe). It started out manufacturing playing cards, yet had a pretty remarkable evolution after its post-war CEO (a member of the founding family, surnamed Yamauchi) took over. While it was a top-down organization, Yamauchi recognized and encouraged some out-of-the box and risky thinking. The company at one point was invested in things like hotels and food, but started to develop a new business in the 1970s around video games. Keep in mind that in 1977 video games were not nearly as popular as they are now, and the nearest product line Nintendo had at the time was toys. Famicom/NES was launched in the mid 1980s, at a time when the videogame market was in a slump (this was post-Atari 2600). It turned out to be a massive hit, that really kept Nintendo on top of the console market until Sony came out with the PlayStation.
The Wii is another example of an innovative approach to product design. It was not designed by focus groups, as the company was worried about leaks. Rather, the design of the console and controller came from an internal group made up mostly of career Nintendo engineers like Shigeru Miyamoto (of Mario Bros. fame). Yamauchi's successor, Satoru Iwata (himself a former game developer) was also on the team. They recognized that they couldn't win the hardware arms race with Sony and Microsoft, a race that focused on specs and pleasing hardcore gamers. They thought of a different set of users, and not only kids and senior citizens waving around a Wiimote. The team even considered how housewives would react to a new console in the living room, and therefore designed a box that was sleek and stylish, and not much bigger than a stack of DVD boxes.
There's a great interview series with the Wii design team, called "Iwata asks". It talks about many of the issues they had to overcome, and the prototyping process. It was published on Nintendo websites all over the world -- I think Iwata wanted to do a little victory lap, and get on record how they came up with the brilliant ideas behind the Wii. You can start reading it here:
For me the meta insight is that this kind of thinking is a huge deal for startups. So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that probably everyone thinks is useless (or at least only marginally useful), and yet to have to stay focussed on the problem(s) you are addressing and take care to address them cleanly and with style. It is actually in those places where others cannot see that some…
Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking? Yes companies that are very successful did something outstanding perhaps, going against the flow, but how much do we know about the number of companies that did stuff everyone thought was useless and it was useless and the whole thing flopped?
We hear about the success stories, I want to then also hear about every failed attempt as well, or it not an accurate picture then, is it?
To put it in other words, it is a bit like encouraging people to play the lottery by showing images of winners. "Look these guys flipped a coin, talked to their astrologer and now look, they are winners!". But what about the ones that play and lose?
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Fairly mundane observations. I liked his point that today's Japanese executives are all corporate drones, salarymen that worked their way up through the system and aren't going to boldly design anything.
That's really not fair. Some of them are competent foreigners that get thrown out when they expose yakuza cronyism. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020365880457663...