
Innovation is saying "No" to 1000 things - ezl
http://zurb.com/article/744/steve-jobs-innovation-is-saying-no-to-1-0
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Theodores
Just because Steve Messiah Jobs says something does not mean that it is
correct or relevant. Nike sell very different products to Apple and Nike know
more about fashion retail than Jobs ever did.

The problem with sports/fashion retail is that it is very subjective.
Furthermore, for some products you need customers to have choice.

I have sold a few Nike products in my time (for cycling, yes, think Lance
Armstrong...) and I did not feel they were that competitive on grounds of
price, sales margin, fit, quality and so on. By any objective measure they
were not that good.

However, what did the customers think? They bought it. Not all of the time,
but some of the time. Depending on the customer I would steer them towards
known best sellers, quality, value or sale items, however, sometimes they
would find the Nike branded products suited them better - fit, colour, taste,
the brand or whatever it was made them prefer those products.

Had Nike listened to Steve Jobs (or me) and got rid of all those shoddy
cycling products then they would have lost all of those sales. Furthermore,
those slightly more 'American sized' customers would not have found what it
was that suited them.

~~~
comrade_ogilvy
Sports/fashion has its peculiarities, but your anecdote is not convincing.

The big reason that Nike is so successful is that they have maintained their
status of a premium brand, in a sweet spot a few notches above where the
competition is cutthroat and less profitable. In the short term, crap sells
and looks good for this year's sales number. In the long term, crap offers
competitors too many openings to convince a consumer that Nike is actually
overrated/overpriced.

Saying "yes" to crap worked really well for Izod, up until the moment it
failed catastrophically.

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headgasket
The genius is in saying no to to the right things. It's in the sort algorithm
that puts the right ones in the top 10. The original iPhone was great not
because it did not have 3G, and the os did not support copy paste. It was
great because it was released early with a pack of "bang". Bang as in the
competition is dead, it's already too late for "adapt or die". Cutting
features or lineup for the wrong reasons is why some of the space the iphone
filled existed: BlackBerry refused to produce a device with wifi because it
pandered to the carriers who wanted to sell more gprs packets and sms at 25c a
pop.

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velodrome
Innovation is an organic process. It takes time and many attempts to get
things right.

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not
discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward".
Thomas A. Edison, Encyclopaedia Britannica

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mathattack
This isn't just for innovation, it's for getting things done. I struggled to
come up with a name for the Useless Extraneous Suggestions, and then I heard
someone call it "Advice from the Idea Fairy." Perhaps it comes from the
military? Idea fairies are never around to help get things done, but they toss
around ideas without thinking them through. The ideas are usually useless, but
still take some time to run down.

This isn't to say all ideas are bad, but there is a lot of "No" that needs to
be said to make things happen.

~~~
analog31
I'm reminded of the old adage: "You can't prove a negative." While I'm not
smart enough to know if this statement is philosophically sound, it occurs to
me that when you're working on something, the number of possible suggestions
is infinite, and conclusively refuting any suggestion is futile. Thus, endless
suggestions of the form: "Why don't you try such-and-so?" are
counterproductive -- especially when they come from the person who writes your
performance review.

For suggestions, I have a place where I can politely write them down for
future use.

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ezl
fwiw this really resonated for me because i'm a single founder in a semi-
crowded space. my strategy for success is to basically have a much smaller
scope and very narrow feature set, but to be crushingly better than the
competition in everything that i _DO_ attempt.

or maybe i'm just seeking out articles that make me feel good about myself.

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amplification
I'm looking for data on whether Nike trimmed down its product line based on
this advice. Has anyone else found anything?

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PhasmaFelis
Somewhat off-topic, but I'm curious about this:

> _Jobs followed this very advice himself back in 1998 when he shrunk Apple 's
> product line from 350 to 10. So instead of creating 350 crappy products, or
> 200 mediocre products, or 100 good products Apple focused on creating 10
> incredibly designed products._

I'm having trouble imagining how Apple managed to have 350 active products at
any one time, ever. Did this include a bunch of software, printers, weird
accessories? Are we counting Apple-branded keyrings and beer coozies, or what?
Honestly curious.

~~~
jroseattle
It's all about the SKUs. Variations of all types, including different
configurations for devices, modifications for selling certain items through
channels, etc. But for Apple, they had all that stuff, and Jobs pared it down.

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Chromozon
Google is an interesting parallel to this. The company encourages the
development of many different ideas, but it has no issue cancelling (with very
short notice) the products that do not take off.

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josephlord
I think strategy rather than innovation is saying "No" to things but if you
don't have a strategy the or clarity for the product the innovation becomes a
lot harder.

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chaseideas
"Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard
to make something simple."

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s_dev
Design is saying No. Innovation is bringing two things together.

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conformal
we use zurb and it is appropriate to see this in a zurb blog post: zurb has
what you need and not a whole lot else, so they clearly subscribe to this
philosophy.

less is more.

