Steve Jobs | “people don’t know what they want”

Great post. It gets me every time I visit a ‘hypermarket’. Hmmn 20 types of multi-grain bread…er…close eyes, pick anything, place in trolley. What amazes me is how tolerant we are of the time we waste on an overabundance of choice, but if a Youtube video loads too slowly, or a web page freezes on our iPhone, we go out of our minds with frustration.

I was trying to flesh out a thought based on the opening argument in terms of the lone inventor, the team, and customer involvement. I came up with this:

Loner vs Team

• technology shifts create opportunities for ‘lone tinkerers’ or ‘dynamic duos’ to discover breakthroughs. The ‘breakthroughs’ generally come about unintentionally(?) or as a consequence of experimentation—i.e. ‘trying stuff out’ in hobby clubs or university labs. Examples include Jobs/Woz’s Apple, Gates’ Q-DOS, Page/Brin Google search, Dorsey’s Twitter(?), Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Karp’s Tumblr…[more examples]. These times favor the lone or duo entrepreneurs.


• other times, there is a highly coordinated effort with large-scale funding to work on specific projects with well-defined objectives—think Xerox Parc, CERN. These are times when teamwork and cooperation is critical.

No/Low customer involvement vs customer co-creation

• For product/service ‘revolution’, customer involvement offers low value.


• For product/service ‘evolution’, customer involvement or even co-creation works very well/is essential.

Does this product/service analogy apply to Content Strategy ideas? I would argue yes—if we consider the Content might become the product.