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

"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."

— Steve Jobs.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
— Henry Ford.

It’s long been a mystery to me how the world’s most successful technology company reached such heights without listening to its customers.

I spent some time in software Product Marketing and I know that you can end up with a wish-list a mile long full of seemingly useful requirement candidates. Everyone has a good idea. The threads in our forum remind me of that. There are so many, many good threads and so little time. How do you start filtering and prioritizing? That becomes a mammoth task.

Many of the best ideas in history were developed by loners in solitary workshops, labs, garages. Think Newton, Da Vinci, Einstein, Wozniak. It’s hard to imagine any of them crowd-sourcing for ideas.

The interesting part for me—as it applies to Content Strategy—is that as technology is commoditized, it becomes harder and harder to differentiate based upon product/service innovation. In fact, the new era of innovation might just be getting peoples’ attention. Sound familiar? In that case, can customers tell us what the best content to grab their attention is, when they’re already swamped with information? Content Strategists are faced with the same dilemma as advertising. How to break through John’s 3 truths with the ‘big idea’.