Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers
helpscout.netCan 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 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."
> "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.
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.
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.
Please also stop perpetuating the fake Henry Ford quote about faster horses.
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.
I get what you're saying, but the quote is always used as straw man shorthand for "consumers don't know what they want", which is not true now, nor was it true for Henry Ford. Perpetuating it is perpetuating a bad argument built on a falsehood.
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 Dilemma.
There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.> for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK > for native apps on the iPhone.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.
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.
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.
They diverted extra developers to those projects, which ended up delaying the upcoming OS X release.
True! I'd forgotten all about that.
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...
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.
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.
>> 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.)
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.
you could go published order. But no matter what you must read Dilemma - its the seminal text.
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.
He was the #1 customer. I think he was building products that were good enough to use himself, because he knew that would impress others. He was a respectful narcissist.
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.
I'll give you narcissist, but I don't think Jobs had any respect for anyone else or their opinions.
This may have been a good or bad thing, according to taste.
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.
If you are devising a new product concept, the very first telephone (or ipod or ipad) say, then what is gained by doing this? Your customers have no point of reference. In general, asking customers what they think is only useful if you are iterating on the known and familiar. Otherwise it is just harvesting random opinions, most of which will be variants of "make it more like what we already know".
So mostly relying on reactive feedback rather than proactive suggestions? I agree.
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.
Maybe instead of saying "you should listen to your customer", we should say "you should observe and learn from your customers".
It 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.
Yeah sure, that trickery is what makes iOS so easy to use for very young children. Time to put away the blinders and put yourself in the perspective of other people.
iOS isn't a full open computing environment, any simple interface is just as "intuitive", compare to android or WP8.
> 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.
I think the title is wrong. Steve jobs listened to his customers and their feedback but never asked them - what should we develop next or what type of computer, music player or phone you like to have?
CEOs who don't listen to their customers end up unemployed quickly.
Never?