Hack:
Avoid asking customers what they want

By William Brown - University of Utah

March 13, 2011 at 5:12am

Summary

Henry Ford is quoted as saying that "if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, a faster horse."

Problem

Incremental improvements will take you some distance, but eventually radical change is needed.

Solution

Airplanes were originally powered by piston engines and propellers. To gain power and efficiency, they added superchargers and turbochargers, but eventually jet engines were better. The death of rotating media hard disk drives has been projected since I was in my 8th Grade , but incremental improvements in the technology kept lowering the cost per bit below solid state drives. Now, finally, solid state is making some inroads.

Bill Gates has been milking the continuous improvement curve for about as long, but smart phones and cloud computing are sneaking up on him

Apple do not innovate much in hardware, their innovation is in the user experience. Hardware and software is seamlessly integrated, the product just simply works as expected. Some people are willing to pay a premium for ease of use. That is Apple's market. They have a saying, "easy is hard. Hard is easy" meaning, it is easy to make something that is hard to use. It is much harder to make something that is easy to use.

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