

Building faster horses - rvivek
http://rvivek.com/2011/07/building-faster-horses/

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gruseom
_“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
– Henry Ford_

Alas, there appears to be no evidence that Ford ever said this and nearly all
appearances of the quote are from the last few years. Also - a tell-tale sign
for bogus quotes - the wording frequently varies. And I'm pretty sure that by
the time Ford came along, people were pretty familiar with the idea of the
automobile. Oldsmobiles, for example, were around before Fords.

But Ford was indeed a proponent of understanding people's needs rather than
doing what they (say they) want. From his autobiography:

 _The salesmen [...] were spurred by the great sales to think that even
greater sales might be had if only we had more models. It is strange how, just
as soon as an article becomes successful, somebody starts to think that it
would be more successful if only it were different. There is a tendency to
keep monkeying with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it. The
salesmen were insistent on increasing the line. They listened to the 5 per
cent., the special customers who could say what they wanted, and forgot all
about the 95 per cent. who just bought without making any fuss. No business
can improve unless it pays the closest possible attention to complaints and
suggestions. If there is any defect in service then that must be instantly and
rigorously investigated, but when the suggestion is only as to style, one has
to make sure whether it is not merely a personal whim that is being voiced.
Salesmen always want to cater to whims instead of acquiring sufficient
knowledge of their product to be able to explain to the customer with the whim
that what they have will satisfy his every requirement--that is, of course,
provided what they have does satisfy these requirements.

Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that
in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going
to be "Model T," and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars,
and I remarked: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants
so long as it is black."_

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/13250680/Henry-Ford-My-Life-and-
Wo...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/13250680/Henry-Ford-My-Life-and-Work)

Edit: I've submitted the "faster horses" line to the proprietor of the
excellent site <http://quoteinvestigator.com> in the hope that it will catch
their interest, in which case we might get to find out where it really came
from.

