

What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth - hellacious
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/what_steve_jobs_taught_me_abou.html

======
intev
I'm not sure I understand the point of this article. Do things differently?
What an original article.

What the article fails to mention is the thousands of startups and companies
that tried to do things differently and failed. I think Steve Jobs took a huge
risk, and he had the ability to pull it off, and he succeeded. Not everyone
can do that. So many things could have gone wrong for someone else.

------
jshowa
How the hell did some business fluff get on a site called "Hacker News"? 95%
of business think can be reduced to fluff, dribel, and nonsense buzz words
like "Do things different", "Think innovatively", etc. Why don't they teach
them something like "Todays Lesson: The public is stupid, so make a fart noise
phone app and you'll get rich."

------
adolph
Seems like "we will use a direct sales/lean inventory model like Dell" isn't
as pithy as profanity.

------
gallerytungsten
As a former Apple VAR, I recall thinking in the late 90s that Apple had this
attitude of "Fuck the channel; we don't need the fuckin' channel." Interesting
to see confirmation.

------
softbuilder
tl;dr: Think Different. Fluff.

~~~
asmithmd1
It shows how bold Jobs was even when Apple was on the ropes. This was the same
year he needed a $150M investment from Microsoft to keep from running out of
cash and he was willing to close the most profitable part of the company
because it was not how he wanted to sell to people. The authors big quote is
from Jobs in 1997 "Fuck the channel. we don't need the fuckin' channel"

That is exactly how I feel as a B2B customer. Companies that sell through "the
channel" have beautiful web pages showing the products and absolutely no way
to find out how much something costs. You need to get a call back from a
salesperson who wants to figure out who your customer is so he can "add value"
right up to the limit of what you will pay. I have begged with these guys to
just give me an order of magnitude: "Do you sell for $100, $1000, $10000?"

~~~
efsavage
This is changing. As people who grew up with the internet start to become
responsible for spending, salespeople are figuring out that "no price = no
lead". It's a slow process, I'd say it's got another 10 years of steam left in
it, as the old guard (on both sides of the table) fade out, but I hear this
concept being discussed from business/sales/MBA people far more today than 10
years ago.

