[ulyssesgrant]

Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect:

"Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

[AndrewKemendo]

We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion - even if it is the landing page approach.

I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?

[gumby]

Well, it's half bull. Apple _did_ have market data as they had already launched the Lisa and had seen what worked (and what didn't). People did like the bitmap display and mouse interface, but couldn't stand the cost or lack of applications (note that mac development was well under way when the Lisa launched).

In addition, they made a lot of changes post launch due to market acceptance, e.g. size of storage, cost etc. The Mac benefited from the fact that Apple was willing to stick with it even though the Apple II was still the cash cow and the Mac struggled.

So it's bull in the sense that they were quite attuned to what the market had to say.

But it's not bull in the sense that they really did go their own way, almost fatally (e.g. no floppy -- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_D...).

[snowwrestler]

There's an important difference between market data--which comes from actual sales--and market research, which is done prior to the launch (and sometimes even prior to the development) of a product.

Apple pays very close attention to market data, and it obviously informs their product development (see the big iPhones now, for example). What they tend not to do is market research: surveys, polls, focus groups, etc.

[hcarvalhoalves]

> So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better?

How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac? Okay, it may help indicate there is an opportunity, but this is the easy part, anyone can do that. It does nothing to indicate how to fulfill that opportunity, it's not the client's job to give a blueprint, and that's the hard part.

Imagine starting a restaurant business by asking people on the street what they like or what they think you should have on the menu... let's just say it's not going to star on Michelin.

> I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?

There's a quote often attributed to Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

I can think of plenty of prior successes that I doubt having started with a survey.

[megablast]

> How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac?

I guess you could get a bunch of different people to come in and try to use it, and do different stuff? See how they react to it, survey them afterwards?

[takatin]

Coming up with products is a bit like coming up with songs or paintings. Market research won't get you Van Gogh's Starry Night or any of the Beatles' songs. Instead it gives you autotune as music and photo filters as art. If you need to come with a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime product, music, painting or anything creative, it has to come from satisficing a basic need in a unique way (often with a personal touch i.e., "soul"). Current startup landscape dominated by validation is basically the autotune model built for quick iterations and easy profits as opposed to the old-school "soul" model which is more of a personal endeavour that transforms into a mass-movement of sorts. Bitcoin would be a modern example of something coming out of the "soul" model.

edit: One place where Market Research does have value in the "soul" model is for refining the product to fit the market better. The germ of the idea is still intensely personal to the founder.

[duncanawoods]

"satisficing a basic need"

Do you mean this? I can see you might or might not. To satisfice would mean stopping at the first minimally acceptable solution to save time and effort. To invoke art and once-in-a-life-time product seems to suggest you want the opposite concept - optimising i.e. to strive relentlessly towards the maximal solution despite the extra time and effort it takes.

[philwelch]

> Market research won't get you...any of the Beatles' songs.

That's exactly how we got most of the Beatles' songs. The Beatles' function in the music industry was to repeat and popularize the ideas of other artists and to follow nascent trends, the same as any pop artist.

[maroonblazer]

>One place where Market Research does have value in the "soul" model is for refining the product to fit the market better.

That's all anyone asks of Market Research.

[bokonist]

How many successful businesses have actually be built by using landing page tests as the primary mechanism to evolve the product idea? I feel like the lean startup fashion is overplayed. The most important thing for a startup is to have a lead customer - a person that passionately wants the idea to exist so they can use it, and knows what it should do. That lead user needs to be either the founders or someone the founders can work very, very closely with.

[coldtea]

>So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better?

The gist is that it's not about how "well you do" money wise, but how well you do in producing what you think is good.

It's not advice for those who would prefer something subpar that would make them more money to something good that might not do as well. etc).

[sopooneo]

But this approach did make them more money.

[coldtea]

Not that much. Machintosh wasn't a huge success at the time.

And anyway, that's beside the point. They didn't go to that approach to make more money, but because they felt they had to go to that approach.

[agumonkey]

I was recently thinking about this. IIUC the gold IPhone was added especially for the asian market right ? If so someone may be rolling in his grave.

[cromulent]

Different stages in the market maturity.

If you are inside the PC revolution and you have a chance to define where it is going, then who knows better than you?

[benihana]

I think it's less a quote meant to be taken literally about doing market research and more a quote demonstrating about the values Apple was working with when building this. I think approaching designing a computer for mass production the way a craftsman or artist would approach their work is the really insightful thing to be pulled from this quote.

[maroonblazer]

That approach may have been viable early in the category's life, but seems unsustainable as new entrants drive down prices. I wonder if Cook, being the ops guy he is, would allow the same expenditures.

Also, it would be unfortunate if the takeaway was "market research has no value". Indeed, later in the interview, when discussing "Why the mouse?" he says:

'We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.'

Clearly, in this case, they didn't trust that they could create "the best thing we could build".