7 ms·

Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research

75 points by craigbellot 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
  - coliveira 17y ago
    That is why Apple decided to design high tech products, as everyone with this vision should do.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
edw519 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  "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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      @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?
pclark 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    "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.
- rimantas 17y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=focus+groups+site:headrush.typepad.com http://www.google.com/search?q=focus+groups+site:headrush.ty...
biohacker42 17y ago
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 17y ago
  "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.
- alanthonyc 17y ago
  finish the quote: "...We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are." I don't think AAPL stock holders have had anything to complain about for the past eight years or so.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- prewett 17y ago
  I don't think there's any legal responsibility to make the shareholders money, just to serve the shareholders' interests. Usually that interest is "make a good return" but there's no reason it needs to be that. Maybe the shareholders formed a company to create functional art. In which case, money is merely a means to the end. (I don't know the law, though, so maybe there is some legal requirement to make money)
Tichy 17y ago
"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 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  But isn't that possibly a result of their agreement with at&t?
  - jpwagner 17y ago
    That's a good point, but if it's the case, Apple was not forthcoming about that. I believe the statement said something about "duplicated functionality."
  - jcl 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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
TweedHeads 17y ago
"Make the very best products. Business will follow." Every startup should focus on that motto.
Alex3917 17y ago
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.
neovintage 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
messel 17y ago
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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
alaskamiller 17y ago
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 17y ago
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.
lecha 17y ago
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 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 17y ago
Wait- can someone answer this for me? Why exactly does it claim Apple doesn't do market research? Because it wants to be innovative?
nir 17y ago
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.

75 points by craigbellot 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
- coliveira 17y ago
  That is why Apple decided to design high tech products, as everyone with this vision should do.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

edw519 17y ago

"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 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    @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?

pclark 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  "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.
rimantas 17y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=focus+groups+site:headrush.typepad.com http://www.google.com/search?q=focus+groups+site:headrush.ty...

biohacker42 17y ago

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 17y ago
"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.
alanthonyc 17y ago
finish the quote: "...We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are." I don't think AAPL stock holders have had anything to complain about for the past eight years or so.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
prewett 17y ago
I don't think there's any legal responsibility to make the shareholders money, just to serve the shareholders' interests. Usually that interest is "make a good return" but there's no reason it needs to be that. Maybe the shareholders formed a company to create functional art. In which case, money is merely a means to the end. (I don't know the law, though, so maybe there is some legal requirement to make money)

Tichy 17y ago

"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 17y ago

"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 17y ago
But isn't that possibly a result of their agreement with at&t?
- jpwagner 17y ago
  That's a good point, but if it's the case, Apple was not forthcoming about that. I believe the statement said something about "duplicated functionality."
- jcl 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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

TweedHeads 17y ago

"Make the very best products. Business will follow." Every startup should focus on that motto.

Alex3917 17y ago

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.

neovintage 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

messel 17y ago

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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

alaskamiller 17y ago

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 17y ago

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.

lecha 17y ago

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 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 17y ago

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

nir 17y ago

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.