I Bin Therbefor

"You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower"

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

"Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

All from comments by Steve Jobs

Get It?

Garrett W

Smart man

zland

Yeah, what I really think about Apple is they come out with some good ideas but always screw them up by making sure you can only use Apple products. Ultimately it means to me I tend to not use as many of their products for that reason.

Likewise, car manufactures are making their products so only they can work on them. For me it means I tend to buy cars that avoid that issue. An example is my Forrester, simple to work on, dependable.

Regarding Jobs, to me he is just another innovator. I tend to not think he is all that special. In comparison, the Wright Bros invented the airplane etc & when it boils down to it, an iphone or ipad is just a simple toy in comparison.

SueTaing

Yeah innovation... they should of never brought up the smaller engine with direct injection plus twin turbo and everyone would of been happy with that especially with a mid engine corvette right?

I know I would but quite a few did not agree with that suggestion.

But yeah innovation all the way!

BobRBob

Not sure where you're coming from on this. I run Windows 7 on my MacBook because I use Quicken Finance which doesn't run on the MacOS. Windows runs better on my Mac than it does on my wife's HP laptop PC. She uses it with her iPhone and she uses iTunes to manage all her music on her PC. People send me MS Office files and OutLook appointments all the time and they are compatible with iWork and iCal s/ware on my Mac. All file formats are cross compatible (Pdfs, JPGs, Mpegs etc.). There are 2 PCs and a Mac in our house and they all work together on the same network using my Apple Airport router. Interoperability between the two platforms is great.

rjwz28

I don't think that's what he meant. iTunes is your only source for music on an iPhone, you can only use iPhone chargers and USB cords, etc. If you buy an Apple product, you can only buy accessories designed for Apples. Unlike other computers, tablets, and smartphones which allow you to use any old microUSB cord from any other smartphone.

rjwz28

May want to explain how this belongs in the C7 section though, as I doubt he was referring to the Corvette when he said any of those things

Guibo

He was not, but some of that can be applied to the automotive world: the truly desirable consumer products are often ones that are produced as a result of a singular design intent, or otherwise not involving too many people and not too much vetting by focus group surveys. Car designers, like designers of Apple products, are in a position to drive consumer desires, so that they end up wanting something even though they really had no idea beforehand that they even wanted or needed it.

And yet look at the success of their products. Most other companies using proprietary hardware foisting non-universal accessories haven't met with such success. For example, look at the ridiculous headphone adapters that came with the older Sony Ericsson phones or the proprietary Memory Stick storage of their older digital cameras. Newer Sony-Ericsson phones now accept normal headphones with no adapter, and newer Sony cameras also now take the more ubiquitous SD storage format. Why's that? Partly because their basic design did not drive desire the way Apple products do. Their design was not enough to overcome the public's resistance to those old obstacles, so they had to change whereas the Apple products, largely by virtue of their design, didn't have to.
By the same token, look at Sony's Walkman MP3 players. Functionally, they do pretty much everything the iPod does (namely, play music stored in a digital format). It does some things better (longer battery life, larger OLED screens, better sound). Functionality is great to have, but the truly desirable products, the ones that are loved and not merely repected, must also connect on an emotional level, and that's where Jobs's statements about the importance of design come into play.

Jobs's words would have been too late for C7 development. Even with the restructuring, GM is a huge company with too many layers of bureacracy, with a long-standing culture of watering down design for reasons of cost. The sheer size of the company makes it even less adaptable to changing public whims. You will find very few large companies with the kind of executive-level hands-on approach to product that Jobs had at Apple. Most car company CEOs come from business backgrounds, rather than design or even engineering backgrounds. Jobs had a bit of all three, and was very hands-on, almost to a fault according to some (others will say you can't bring a ship safely back to port through democracy; a bit of tyranny is in order).
But cars like the Cadillac Ciel is a step in the right direction, IMO. Few people were really asking for that kind of car, but by building the concept, GM not only knocked the motoring world for a loop, it awakened quite a bit of interest.

SCM_Crash

There's a lot of irony in a few of those quotes.

ockie

I don't think you have been a computer user long enough to understand the proprietary design of Apple.

It took them decades to release bootcamp because they did not want anyone to run windows on their platforms.

BobRBob

I was a computer programmer in 1968.

Apple released bootcamp shortly after they moved to Intel technology. Before that it was not possible to run windows native on the hardware. That was not decades ago.

It was six years ago.

I Bin Therbefor

He was refering to product development of any type.

He was refering to design for any product.

If are not joking and don't understand how these comments apply to the C7, then I suggest you read the three books about the three Corvette Chief Engineers and their struggles to build the best Corvette they could imagine. For example, GM's use of focus groups from All Corvettes Are Red and how those groups drove the design of the C5.

Kevin_NYC

Vast majority of computer and electornics design is crap

Sony made radios look and feel nice, vs. the garbage Zenith, RCA, etc were making

Apple did the same vs. TRS-80, Osborne, Commodore, IBM

As a side note the Justice Dept fought IBM for 10yrs on their unique peripherals "plug" design...and they argued it stunted competition

Apple...who argued against IBM......did same strategy....just let people buy their stuff slowly and then a Tidal wave of orders came in...Govt was too late

The #1 Venture Capitalist...said Jobs 2 qualities: "Arrogance and unbridled Confidence"

Wont work in cubicles, or corporate rat race....but if u r in Sales or Entreprenuer...watch out...it WORKS !!!!