The Myth of Apple Knowing What People Want (Premium)

There's a myth, cultivated by former CEO Steve Jobs, that Apple provides customers with products they never knew they wanted. And with Jobs gone, that myth is reaching epic status as the firm struggles to find a major post-iPhone success story.

My point here isn't to disparage Apple. Or its excellent products.

Truth is, Apple has done a stunning job of delivering successful products to customers. But none of those successes would never have happened had the company not learned from its mistakes in each case and then adjusted its strategy quickly and accordingly. Apple would have simply released very good products with important missing features and would have only seen middling success with each.

I bring this up now because of a compelling article in The New York Times called Apple Used to Know Exactly What People Wanted — Then It Made a Watch. It's worth reading. But like so many, the author has simply accepted a myth---something akin to "Microsoft only gets its right on the third try"---and applied it to the firm's current situation, skewing both history and the truth of the matter.

The problem is, his Apple Watch example actually proves my point. Which is that Apple---under Steve Jobs and then Tim Cook---has always done a middling job of anticipating what people want. But then it fixes the problems, quickly, and often to spectacular result. This company is more feedback-driven that it usually admits.

Let's step through Steve Jobs' major successes.

iPod. Routinely hailed as the beginning of Apple's rise to fame and fortune and the reason the company dropped the word "Computer" from its name, the iPod was hobbled out of the gate by two huge issues: It only worked on the Mac and it was too expensive. As a result, it sold poorly. So Apple lowered prices, often by introducing new models. And it opened up the product to Windows users, something Jobs refused to consider early on. But doing so is the primary reason that sales exploded.

iPhone. With Apple selling tens of millions of units every month now, it's hard to remember that the iPhone was a dud when it launched. The device was far too expensive, so Apple cut prices just one month after its initial release, and then twice more in the next year. It was only available on AT&T, and only supported 2G networking, so Apple expanded availability and its capabilities over time. And there was no app store: Jobs foolishly believed that he could control the ecosystem, and only after relenting did the iPhone truly take off.

iPad. The most ill-defined of Jobs' major product launches---"the question has arisen, lately, is there room for a third category of device in the middle" [of the phone and PC]? Jobs had asked rhetorically---the iPad was supposed to jump-start the post-PC era. But after an initial flurry of interest, iPads sales slowed and then declined for years. And an attempt to fix things with the more powerful iPad Pro likewise failed. So Apple was only able to r...