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Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

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Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#11

Post by ryanmolden »

enraged_camel wrote: post #7
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

Steve Jobs did listen to customers--more than most business executives. He famously read his own email and would write back to customers directly. He made major strategic decisions based on customer feedback, for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK for native apps on the iPhone. He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's…

>> The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's Dilemma. 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?

I've only (yet) read Innovator's Dilemma, I would definitely recommend it. As for order, I suspect publication order would be the best as it would show progression of ideas/learning.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#12

Post by rimantas »

snowwrestler wrote: post #6

Steve Jobs did listen to customers--more than most business executives. He famously read his own email and would write back to customers directly. He made major strategic decisions based on customer feedback, for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK for native apps on the iPhone. He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's…

  > for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK
  > for native apps on the iPhone.
There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#13

Post by aviraldg »

rimantas wrote: post #12
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

Steve Jobs did listen to customers--more than most business executives. He famously read his own email and would write back to customers directly. He made major strategic decisions based on customer feedback, for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK for native apps on the iPhone. He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's…

> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK > for native apps on the iPhone. There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

afaik, the original plan was not to allow third party apps on the iPhone

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#14

Post by samspenc »

> When asked why he bristled at his peers’ suggestion, Johnson responded, "We didn't test at Apple.”

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.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#15

Post by benjaz »

tawgx wrote: post #2

I think the best way to work with customers (and I do believe you should) is not having theoretical discussions with them about the market or whether a new product can take off, but rather give them a number of tangible alternatives (can be mock ups) to play with and see how they react to them.

Often, customers don't see the consequences of "small" changes that they'd like to see. At AOL we had so many people giving feedback on products that it became a customer support issue. One solution proposed was to have a dummy site that allowed users to move elements around. Whenever they moved something on the page (or dragged/dropped from a dynamic list of popular suggestions) they'd see the consequences in real-time. Big bold messages declaring all the changes that were just made would make it obvious that they need to think through their ideas.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#16

Post by pyre »

aviraldg wrote: post #13
rimantas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK > for native apps on the iPhone. There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

afaik, the original plan was not to allow third party apps on the iPhone

That's what he said in public, but there was a lot of suspicion that an SDK just wasn't ready for the iPhone launch, but was planned all along. Jobs never would have gone on stage and talked about how an SDK was ~ a year down the road, during the launch of a brand new product. It would have detracted from the, "look at this brand new shiny thing that we've built," buzz.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#17

Post by gdubs »

bslatkin wrote: post #9

Can we stop perpetuating this myth please? 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 mot…

The Isaacson biography talks a bit about, if I recall correctly, how a lot of post-game analysis done on apple products is meant to institutionalize knowledge gained during the development process.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#18

Post by malkia »

snowwrestler wrote: post #6

Steve Jobs did listen to customers--more than most business executives. He famously read his own email and would write back to customers directly. He made major strategic decisions based on customer feedback, for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK for native apps on the iPhone. He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's…

Or the lock orientation button, which Steve wanted to be used only for turning sound on/off, but after many users complaining about there was an option put in the settings.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#19

Post by abeh »

aviraldg wrote: post #13
rimantas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK > for native apps on the iPhone. There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

afaik, the original plan was not to allow third party apps on the iPhone

as i remember, iPhone sdk was released after Android. it seemed to be that iPhone sdk was not intended for developers, but Android forced them to, because it seemed like an obviously good idea.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#20

Post by Samuel_Michon »

aviraldg wrote: post #13
rimantas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK > for native apps on the iPhone. There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

afaik, the original plan was not to allow third party apps on the iPhone

iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. The iPhone SDK was made available in March of 2008. The App Store opened on July 11, 2008.

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.

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