
Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research - craigbellot
http://bokardo.com/archives/steve-jobs-on-why-apple-doesnt-do-market-research/
======
Alex3917
This isn't even true. Apple does tons of market research and Steve Jobs even
quotes it at his keynotes when he's releasing new products. (Remember what he
said when he released garage band, and the reasons he gave for switching to
Intel...) This whole article is just a PR piece designed to make them look
cool and trip up their competitors who are dumb enough to believe it.

------
pclark
I think these articles are possibly quite damaging to startups.

Not everyone can design the product _they_ want - its quite a rare skill. You
get wrapped up in irrelevant features.

~~~
phsr
Definitely agree with this. You have to know that there are enough of "you" to
be able to produce a marketable product. There is also a difference between
this and "eat your own dog food" software, aka using what you've built.

~~~
rodyancy
"Not everyone can design the product they want - its quite a rare skill. You
get wrapped up in irrelevant features."

This skill is hard to find in a startup because founders have more technical
acumen than the market. In other words founders are "power users," and most
markets are not.

Also, editing your own work, as in looking at something that you've spent
months on, saying, "this sucks," and restarting takes a lot of discipline. For
a start-up that is worried about its runway, the stress of doing so can be
overwhelming.

------
edw519
"we design for ourselves"

Be very, very careful here. You can just as easily lose your shirt as you can
come up with a hit. What your users will buy and use may be very different
from what you think.

What sometimes works in the consumer market often doesn't work in the business
to business space. There are cemetaries full of companies that designed for
themselves, especially in software.

When I hear someone like Steve Jobs say he doesn't do market research, it
reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public
anyway.

Sometimes I think posts like this are just part of the big PR machine to
maintain the "Apple mystique". Would you bet a billion dollars of someone
else's money without talking to anyone first?

~~~
plinkplonk
"it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public
anyway."

Fwiw, I don't want watch tv. (And I know a few people who choose not to watch
TV) Too much of a time sink. I don't even own one. The one practical
difficulty I found is that most game consoles seem to work with TV sets (and
not with monitors, of which I have a few lying around the house) so I don't
have a game console either.

~~~
icefox
I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep, read a classic novel
every month, invest wisely, only listen to "good" music and never pop, never
use a windows computer, never get sad, volunteer every other month, don't
gossip, can live with waiting to find out which game console to buy after the
market decides, never impulse shop, don't need the latest iphone, run a
marathon every year, always dress in style, best friends with my in-laws, have
a perfect marriage, eat the healthy choices at restaurants, never laugh at
other peoples misfortunes, never send "funny" emails to my friends, always
ignore spam, don't take photos of my cat...

~~~
plinkplonk
@icefox, (abstractly) amusing, but I don't quite get it.

Is this some kind of American cultural assumption (that everyone watches TV
and is lying about it if they say they don't)? I know many people (who can
afford TV s) here in India who don't watch TV. Of course there are many people
who are addicted to Tv as well, but someone not watching TV doesn't seem to
evoke the kind of response in your post.

oh btw " "I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep,.." check,
check and check. Is this so unusual?

~~~
modeless
The American cultural thing you're missing is that it's now considered gauche
to brag about how you don't watch TV, even if it's true. For a while not
owning a TV was fashionable; now there's a stereotype of "goody-two-shoes"
people who go out of their way to avoid watching TV and brag about it
repeatedly to anyone who will listen.

~~~
plinkplonk
"The American cultural thing you're missing is ... there's a stereotype of
"goody-two-shoes" people who go out of their way to avoid watching TV and brag
about it repeatedly to anyone who will listen."

Thanks. very enlightening. Thanks. very enlightening. Hereabouts "I don't have
a/watch TV" is neutral statement, not bragging.

------
jacquesm
That's a little gem in there 'we design for ourselves'. If you build stuff
that you yourself would not use then you're on the wrong track, because you
will be your own most critical customer and when you are happy then chances
are that lots of other people will also be happy with what you have created.

~~~
jsonscripter
That totally depends, though. If you're designing general computing or
consumer goods, fine. If you're designing a custom point of sale program for a
particular industry, that statement clearly doesn't apply.

~~~
jacquesm
That's absolutely true, that was not what I had in mind.

Websites, gadgets, consumer goods, the stuff that you interact with on a daily
basis, the kind of stuff that apple produces.

Effectively that is the crux of the 'we don't do market research', if you are
your own consumer then you can get away with that. As soon as you are selling
to people that will use the stuff you build and you yourself will never use it
you are going to have to do very much your best in order to make sure that
your customer is happy because you can no longer look in to their head.

------
biohacker42
_Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring
to market good products_

And yet they are a publicly traded company, how does "our goal isn't to make
money" work with their fiduciary duties?

~~~
mahmud
"our goal isn't to make money" is not in their corporate guidebooks or
manifesto, it's in their press-release. it contributes directly to their
bottom-line, I say.

------
alaskamiller
Um... Apple does market research. It does a shit ton of it. It does it now and
it's done it a long time ago. Back in the 90's, with children. They would
truck us in, 3rd graders in the elementary schools nearby, and take us to
meeting rooms and show us gadgets, educational toys but maybe they showed off
software too, and asks us how we like them.

Even now there's a lot of teams dedicated to market research.

------
billswift
Market research can be useful, but there are two significant drawbacks to it
for innovative products:

1) the User Interface drawback, read any books on designing HCI and you will
be told not to do as the prospective user initially says he wants, give him a
mock-up and see how he uses it, he probably doesn't really know what he wants
until he tries it; in this type of case without a mock-up or practice, an
experienced designer will probably do better than market research would;

2) for something really innovative who is the prospective market and how will
they use it?. If it is REALLY innovative, then even the designers are likely
to mis-judge how it is likely to be used. This is related to pg's common
refrain that a startup will likely change direction, sometimes more than once.

------
Tichy
"Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring
to market good products…"

Sure - and Apple's messages to the press are also never carefully crafted for
maximum effect.

------
jpwagner
"Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring
to market good products…"

Doesn't sound in-line with blocking google voice apps.

~~~
wglb
But isn't that possibly a result of their agreement with at&t?

~~~
jcl
Which is another thing I'm curious about... How does their agreement with AT&T
help the end-user experience?

It seems there are plenty of people who would be happy to use another carrier.
And, in other countries, you can apparently buy unlocked phones from Apple. So
the agreement with AT&T seems to be more about making money than about making
great products...

~~~
dsturnbull2205
Probably a combination of that and three other important things:

a) compromise on things like this in order to gain bigger freedoms, namely,
the App Store - carriers are usually getting a cut, but not in this case

b) poor consumer protection in the US - carrier unlocking is, at least in some
countries, required by law

c) (related to above) young, immature mobile market in the US

------
neovintage
I'm a little skeptical about this one. For one, when doing corporate strategy
and deciding what to build, you need to understand the dynamics and
deficiencies in the marketplace. So at some level, someone within the
organization had to evaluate using either primary (focus groups, surveys) or
secondary (already published studies and facts) research to see if the idea or
product was viable. Now I'm guessing that secondary research might be more the
norm at Apple because primary research might give people that are in the
potential target market an idea of what new products are in the pipeline.
Apple wouldn't want to give hints at what it's doing by performing primary
research.

I'm not staying they have to do tons, they need to have some understanding of
who they're going after.

~~~
philwelch
When Jobs returned, they already made Macs by default. The iPod was Tony
Fadell's idea, but that was for a market that didn't really even exist yet, so
it's hard to see how market research would help. They just tapped into the
universal human need for music with that one. The iPhone was likely based on a
deep understanding of how much cell phones generally suck and a vague
recognition that cell phones are a huge enough market to accept a new niche
player.

I'm not sure how product research would even help. It's great if you're
refining an existing product or entering into a well-understood market, but
Apple's game is to reshape the market around itself, rather than reshaping
itself around the market.

------
nir
1\. “Make the very best products. Business will follow” - if there's one
company who knows this _not_ to be true, it's Apple, ca. mid-80s to late 90s.
IMHO the web's rise as the main application was as responsible to Apple's
comeback as anything, eroding Windows' software range advantage.

2\. This kind of articles are a bit troubling since some people read them and
figure they can be Steve Jobs too. If you know someone like that, you know
what I mean.

------
messel
Depending on your market size/slice it's possible in a good sized company to
have folks that are so well entwined in that community that they can help give
feedback about their favorite products. Part of the problem with marketing is
that people don't know what they want.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y>

------
lecha
Jobs is one of the most deliberate, careful and calculated when it comes to
public statements. More on PR see <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

While the post highlights the PR bit you can see though, it does include a
couple of useful links with good insights about the role of design in the
product development process.

------
dbz
Wait- can someone answer this for me? Why exactly does it claim Apple doesn't
do market research? _Because_ it wants to be innovative?

------
TweedHeads
"Make the very best products. Business will follow."

Every startup should focus on that motto.

