[MattGaiser]

Jobs famously ignored what customers asked for though.

Customers did not get direct input into what he built.

> “Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

Many devs don't even get input into the feature, yet alone the ability to ignore customer input when they believe it to be wrong.

[aaron-lebo]

Exactly! I worship at the altar of Steve. I've got a shrine in my house. That quote is kind of at the heart of what I wrote.

It's why I said:

> The user a lot of times doesn't know what they want or need until they see it, so it comes down to us, the designers to empathize and guide the user.

Users do not want complexity, they want to be empowered. There is a subtle but important difference there and it's easy to disguise the latter as the former.

Is that a quibble over semantics? It might be. But to call the post "nonsense" is just as much of a quibble, because there's real truth there, the success and adoption of the Mac etc is proof of it.

[abernard1]

Apple is pretty unsuccessful at most _software_ that isn't a commodity. They're a hardware and marketing company at their core. All the actual value from software on their platform comes from 3rd party providers, whether that's apps or SaaS.

The easiest point to make on this is that Apple has botched all of their SaaS offerings not related to content. And their office applications are borderline unusable for anything aside from education or the content industry. Everyone adopts either Google Suite or Microsoft Office (or a combo) depending on their use case.

It's highly arguable that Apple "empowers" people with software given that everybody uses software on top of their platform not provided by Apple.

[aaron-lebo]

You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though.

To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating.

If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.

[clairity]

that quote is way more (personal) branding than operational imperative. yes, jobs trusted his intuition and had purposeful influence, but he had thousands of people around him that also performed and integrated market research in honing their products for good UX. it was never just one guy magically making perfect choices to the delight of the masses.

[aaron-lebo]

That kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?

The buck has to stop somewhere. If Jobs did not drive the company that way, you could have 100k people under him doing that stuff and it wouldn't be readily apparent. I mean, look at the slow decline of the company after he left the first time, as they chased more and more options for users.

He's also notorious (any of his bios will show this) at direct and obsessive involvement in product and even store design.

[clairity]

apparently it needed saying--the parent post by @MattGaiser claimed customers, and even developers, at apple didn't get a direct say in product because of jobs. but that's clearly not the case. yes, jobs had great influence, but so did thousands of other stakeholders.