A Quote by George Gilder
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.
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It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse.
Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.
Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.
If the present American laws concerning the taxation of the profits of corporations, the incomes of individuals, and inheritances had been introduced about 60 years ago, all those new products whose consumption has raised the standard of living of the 'common man' would either not be produced at all or only in small quantities for the benefit of a minority. The Ford enterprises would not exist if Henry Ford's profits had been taxed away as soon as they came into being.
Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.
I don't have that many days left," he said as we sat together in the library. "Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn't come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care.
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.
We didn't push it down people's throats...One turned into three in a short period of time. I built the first one and...one day someone walked in and said "You know, I really like the design on this. Who built that?" I said "I did." He goes "Well, would you be interested in building me one?" I went "Yeah, I'll do that."
People are going through tough times. I want to say to them, "Live your joy." I know I can tell them that because I went through a lot of hard times. I had a choice of either succumbing to the hard times or figuring it out.
I don't know where it's come from, but after many years of many different products, I feel like I can speak as an authority on a lot of them.
At the end of the day, customer choice is essential. And we don't make products that compete with Apple, nor make products that compete with Google. Our customers come in both iOS and Android flavors, and I hope our customers can still buy the products they want to purchase wherever they want to purchase them.
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?
Many people have said we just need to add more products. Look at Oracle, look at SAP. Add ERP and inventory or compensation. Add all this stuff. What we realized is we're the customer company. We're the front office solution, and our customers would be really upset if we just added a whole bunch of stuff and lost focus.
You cannot break a horse until they're about 2 years old. You can halter-break them, meaning teach them how to lead and stuff, if you choose to, but you can't really break them until they're 2 because there aren't developed enough, you know what I mean? It would be like a 5-year-old playing football or something, you know?
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