Archive for July 2009
Demanding a faster horse
Apple definitely has success at developing organic growth, and a lot of that has to do with Jonathan Ive, at least when looking from the outside. In this blog post, the following excerpt jumps out at me. It really captures what frustrates me about working on enterprise software in a corporate environment.
“We don’t do focus groups,” Ive said firmly when asked how Apple decided what products to build. He explained that focus groups resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone. (To which Sir Christopher added Henry Ford’s famous line that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have demanded a faster horse.)
The approach of cramming every feature possible into a piece of software is something I’m quite familiar with. When will companies start realizing they should be focusing more on what features to throw out?
