A recent post by Joshua Porter attempts to sum up Apple’s innovation strategy: “Make the very best products. Business will follow,” he concludes. In it, Porter tracks down a quote by Steve Jobs in which he says the company does no market research:
“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”*
If this isn’t bull, it’s foolish.
Clearly the company does have a strategy that doesn’t include playing follow-the-leader, but I think Jobs is a bit disingenuous about being completely unaware of what customers say they want. There’s always a risk of getting out ahead of competition and then watching over your shoulder instead of keeping an eye on where you’d like the pack to go. But the thought of ditching all manner of tracking customer trends is ridiculous. (It also implies that you’re not interested and that you know best, which might have some traction here, but that’s a different matter.)
Apple hit a homer with its guess at where the music industry was headed, but they’ve had a checkered history there, too. Remember DRM? Yeah, Jobs was able to smooth it out (for the most part) but the company held on to unpopular licensing software for a long time.
And yesterday’s report that the iPhone app store won’t allow anything for Google Voice reads like more of the same. Maybe it’s a move spurred by AT&T, which is understandably concerned that VoIP would impact their wireless business as it has their traditional telephone service. But a little market research would tell Apple that cell plans are a huge source of angst and that the Byzantine rate and contract structure that dominates that industry is ripe to be blasted open through innovation.
So while too much research about markets you dominate might be a risk, no research into markets you’re entering is much riskier and could damage your image as an innovator. Here, Apple risks looking like they’re completely in bed with (and under the thumb of) stodgy old Ma Bell. And I’ll bet plenty of their customers (yes, even fanboys) would be willing to let them know about it.
*Jobs’ quote comes from a CNN/Money/Fortune story. For the record, the click-to-continue, “slideshow” format of this story, presumably to pad certain site metrics for advertisers, is completely bogus.
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