Via Dave
“If you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year,” says Steve Jobs.
This might sound a bit self-serving at first. But when he tells you why, you know why you can’t wait for their next great thing or new iteration of some existing thing you already own…
“You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff.”
Amen. And that’s why we love to buy the latest greatest from Steve Jobs.
If company owners spent the time and effort he does innovating and making better stuff, using people who are crazy about what they’re doing, they’d need to spend less money advertising and promoting products that aren’t special, much less remarkable. We’d also get to live in a much less noisy world.
Innovation without concern for the consumer is tantamount to arrogance on fire. Many years ago my wife and I bought about $15,000 worth of educational software designed to run on the premier Apple of the day. The very next computer Apple brought out was so “innovative” that the software we invested in for our students wouldn’t run. We learned that Apple was not concerned about consumers as much as coming out with ever-changing products that are not backward compatible. Steve Jobs lost us at that point. We are, after all, teachers who, even if we would commit to spending every available dollar we earned, would find it impossible to keep up with the technology of the day that doesn’t recognize the value of backward compatibility. Not only must we buy the new machine but all new software to go with it. Software is the expensive part to computing if you are really using a computer.
PC is 95% of the market for a reason.
I applaud, admire, and encourage innovation but not at the expense of loyalty to the consumer base that makes funding for that innovation possible. Imagine just how much more Steve Jobs could have done had he not neglected this one issue. Macintosh may be a premium Apple but it comes with an extaordinarily premium price which makes it, for we teachers, a bitter fruit.