Listen to Steve Jobs on Customer centricity versus Technology Centricity. A valuable business lesson that companies and employees forget very quickly. We all have solutions in search of problems…
There’s a lot of technology in search of a customer.
You know in other words a lot of companies do things because it’s technically possible. But in the end, nobody cares, nobody wants to buy them.
So we see a lot of that: technology in search of a customer.
I think the hard thing is to figure out what can be done, but also what people really want to do.
What we found is an example in iPods, is that most of our customers don’t care about having a radio built into their iPod. As a matter of fact, the reason they got an iPod is because they don’t want some DJ in radio station determining the music they listen to. They want to determine it themselves, they want to build their own playlists. And so that’s why they buy an iPod. We have a radio feature that you can attach to your iPod now, but most customers don’t buy it because they want their own playlists.
It’s a lot easier to come up with technology that people don’t want than it is to come up with technology that people do want.
Understanding this might be the reason why Apple keeps beating other companies and growing year after year?