31 Aug 2011

Originally I don’t plan to be another Steve Jobs advocator after the whole world is talking about him for years long. And especially recently after his resignation as Apple CEO. But an aside from Garry Tan suddenly made me think this as a fact:

It’s Apple’s series of products and Steve Jobs and his team lifted up the user experience industry to a unprecedented place. They made ordinary people to be better aware of the importance of user experience for a product. To be more explicitly, people today are willing to spend more than ever amount of bucks for a product with brilliant experience.

And this actually started from decade ago. What he said was really insightful and inspiring.

Question:

I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say java, in any of it’s incarnations, addresses the idea (inaudible). And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years.

Steve:

You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but…. One of the hardest things when you’re trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas.

……

The hardest thing is: how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case.

……

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take.

In another video, he also added:

You think about focusing, you think focusing is about saying “yes?” No. Focusing is about saying no. And you’ve got to say “no,” “no,” “no.” And you know you’re going to piss off people. and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article about you. And it’s really a pisser. Because you wanna be nice, you don’t wanna to tell the San Jose Mercury the person who is telling you this was just asked to leave, or this or that. So you take the lumps, and Apple’s been taking their share of lumps for the last six months. In a very unfair way. And it’s been taking them like an adult and I’m proud of that. And there’s more to come, I’m sure. There’ll be stories like that, they come and go, but focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products. Where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.