Amaya Toman Steve Jobs was, in many ways, a very inspiring, albeit idiosyncratic personality. A number of important people from the industry constantly remember what the cooperation with the co-founder of the apple company taught them. One of them is Guy Kawasaki, whose collaboration with Jobs was very intense in the past.
Kawasaki is a former Apple employee and the company's chief evangelist. He willingly shared his experience with Steve Jobs with the editors of the server The Next Web. The interview took place directly in Silicon Valley for the purpose of podcast editor Neil C. Hughes. During the interview, business, startups and the beginning of Kawasaki's career at the Apple company were discussed, where he was in charge of marketing the original Macintosh, for example.
The lesson from Jobs, which Kawasaki identified as the most significant, is also a bit controversial. This is because the principle is that the customer cannot tell the company how to innovate. Most of the feedback (not only) from customers is in the spirit of encouraging the company to work better, faster and cheaper. But this is not the direction that Jobs wanted to take his company.
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"Steve didn't care about your race, skin color, sexual orientation or religion. All he cared about was whether you were actually competent enough,” recalls Kawasaki, according to whom Steve Jobs was also able to teach how to get a product to market. According to him, there was no point in waiting for the right product and the right time. The Macintosh 128k wasn't perfect for its time, according to Kawasaki, but it was good enough to start distribution. And bringing a product to market will teach you more about it than researching it in a closed environment.
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In a world where "Our customer, our master" is more of a cliché, Jobs' claim that people don't know what they want seems a little cheeky - but that's not to say his attitude hasn't borne fruit. Hughes recalls an interview with Noel Gallagher from the band Oasis. The latter confided to him during an interview at the Coachella festival in 2012 that most of today's consumers know what they want, but it is very difficult to satisfy each of them and such an effort can ultimately be more harmful. "The way I see it is that people didn't want Jimmy Hendrix, but they got him," Gallagher stated at the time. “They didn't want a 'Sgt. Pepper', but they got him, and they didn't want the Sex Pistols either." This statement is actually completely in line with one of Jobs' most famous quotes, that people don't know what they want until you show them.
Do you agree with this statement by Jobs? What do you think of his approach to customers?
If you do things uncreatively, you are necessarily just copying. It doesn't mean you can't get rich doing it, but you won't become a leader. Today, typically, for example, Koreans with their best station wagons. Maybe in time he will understand and everything will be different. That's how it is today. Innovative companies are in the USA, partly in the EU. Otherwise, not much, although we will certainly find exceptions that confirm the rule.