Anybody Reading Walter Isaacson Book on Steve Jobs?

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Glenn

Friedland made billions by talking his way into GOLDMINING.

Jobs did it with APPLE.

Hi Glenn,

When Steve Jobs passed away, I saved a whole bunch of articles about him. Your post inspired me to go back and read through some of them...

Here's a quote from one of them that I think is remarkable, and probably gets right to the heart of Steve Jobs' entrepreneurial success...

Back in 1997, Steve Jobs had just returned to be the CEO of Apple again. However, he hadn't yet "proven" himself with this second time at the company he co-founded...

At the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Jobs got a tough question from the audience... He was asked, what have you been doing the last 7 years?

Steve Jobs answered (in part)...

"The hardest thing is: how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it."

And also...

"And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take."

(This comes from here ... http://garry.posterous.com/how-steve...olls-wwdc-1997 . You can watch the video here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&t=51m15s and also here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE .)

This reminds me of an approach that some direct-response marketers take.

They write the sales piece first - before they even create the product!

In the sales letter, they make it a "dream" product. Everything the customer would ever want!

Then... Once they've got that nailed... Then, they create the product!

Now, the product may not be able to fulfil everything in the original sales letter. However, they have the "perfect vision" of the product - from the customer's point of view - first.

(Later, if they can't make the product fulfil every vision in the original sales letter, they edit the sales letter, so the new version accurately describes the product.)

However, this specifies essentially the same approach that Steve Jobs talks about. Look at it from the customer's point of view first. Then... figure out how to make it...

(So many "tech" companies in particular, but also others, do it backwards... I've got to work on applying this approach better myself, too...)

Best wishes,

Dien