Maybe instead of saying "you should listen to your customer", we should say "you should observe and learn from your customers".
Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#22Steve 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?
Innovator's Dilemma is much more academic and research-filled, Innovator's Solution is more "here's what you do with it." I'd recommend Innovator's Solution first as it's a somewhat lighter introduction. (I haven't read Seeing What's Next, so can't comment there.)
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#23It seems like there's two sides to creating demand for a product, natural customer desire and customer desire plasticity.
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.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's very clear who reacted to whom:
"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...
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#25CEOs who don't listen to their customers end up unemployed quickly.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not as though the public SDK was a totally new thing. It contained some new components, but AFAIK most of it was existing stuff that they just hadn't released an SDK for (heck, a lot of it was stuff the iPhone inherited from OS X). All the awkwardness surrounding the SDK's actual release — for example, the neverending, absurdly restrictive NDA that seemed to flummox Apple's own community reps — really did feel like a rush job. I find it a little weird to think that Apple didn't intend to release the Cocoa Touch SDK after touting it so highly, but it did kind of feel that way.
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.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple had obviously already developed the tools (most of them being extension of the OSX tools) and some (or many) of the APIs (again most of them being extensions/rethinks of the existing OSX APIs) for their own internal use.
A year later, things still felt pretty awkwardly rough.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Every piece of reporting I've read, including books like Isaacson's bio and Lashinsky's Inside Apple, shows that the initial plan was to not have an SDK for the iPhone, because of fears about security and terrible apps "ruining" the experience.
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.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#29Can 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…
Please also stop perpetuating the fake Henry Ford quote about faster horses.
Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They diverted extra developers to those projects, which ended up delaying the upcoming OS X release.