[latexr]

Something like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s

> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

[automatic6131]

> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!

[hkt]

ChatGPT, tell me how I should feel about this!

[direwolf20]

That works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.

[torginus]

Apple was a well established company when they came out with the iPhone - I don't think anyone but Jobs would've been able to pull off something like that.

That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software, UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been impossible to do in a startup.

[direwolf20]

He had a customer experience in mind, so he found the intersection with every existing technology, and it was impressive. But there are also times when you add a new technology to your collection, so you find the intersection with every existing customer experience.

[crote]

Isn't that why the big tech companies switched to acquiring up-and-coming scaleups?

[NitpickLawyer]

> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.

[monooso]

> We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve.

We've always had that.

In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."

Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.

[latexr]

I think you’re missing the point. Of course you can make such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something great (at several levels of great, not just “makes money”) you have to start with the need and build a solution, not have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.

The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.

[ViktorRay]

Are you sure the internet begs to differ?

The dot com bubble crashed. Many websites like pets.com ended up closing up.

It wouldn’t be until much later that those ideas succeeded…when companies were able to work from the customer experience backward to the technology.

[djmips]

I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been - probably would have been an AI leader.

[jayd16]

Jobs also needed to control the user experience. Apple wasn't really a web leader either.

They were able to bootstrap a mobile platform because they could convince themselves they had control of the user experience.

I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.

[rightbyte]

> I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.

Instead of doing almost correct email summaries Jobs would have a LLM choose color of the send button with an opaque relationship with the emotional mood of the mail you write.