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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

#31

Post by gfodor »

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…

There is a difference between using focus groups to decide if you should build a phone with an entirely new OS for touch screens and using one to see just how badly people need copy and paste for v1.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#32

Post by kstenerud »

Some important things to note:

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.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#33

Post by gfodor »

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 SDK example is a great example of "faster horses." The crowd clamoring for the SDK was not asking for the App Store, it was asking for a model like PCs.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#34

Post by lloeki »

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…

> "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."

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.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#35

Post by aggie »

mratzloff wrote: post #29
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…

Please also stop perpetuating the fake Henry Ford quote about faster horses. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877934

It's interesting to hear about the historical facts (thanks for sharing) but I have to disagree with your position.

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.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#36

Post by Shooti »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #24
abeh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Android SDK was announced November 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#37

Post by Samuel_Michon »

Shooti wrote: post #36
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Android SDK was announced November 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

Of course there was a SDK, how else would developers make apps for the platform? Are you implying Google was planning an app store back then? The video doesn't speak of it. Or are you stating that date as a start of Android? In which case, you can go back way further in time.

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.

Re: Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

#39

Post by Samuel_Michon »

snowwrestler wrote: post #30
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True! I'd forgotten all about that.
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