Why Apple is Great

Just riffing on my previous Apple love post: did you know that Apple doesn’t use focus groups to develop its products? Here’s a great quote from Steve Jobs in Businessweek, May 25, 1998:

“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.”

Here’s another one from March 2008 in Fortune:

“So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ ”

…

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple’s retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

[quotes from this forum thread on ArsTechnica]

Apple’s example goes to the heart of what’s so appealing about “enlightened despotism” as a means of social organization: most people who’ve used an Apple machine after using Windows can testify that it’s a superior experience, damning testimony against the democratically-inspired design-by-committee method so popular at Microsoft.

The challenge, of course, comes in succession—not everyone is a Steve Jobs or a Lee Kuan Yew, nor can we expect many such visionary individuals to be born in our world in one lifetime. Cue Winston Churchill on democracy…