Fast Company: Steve Jobs Lessons

Jobs was ahead of his time: he saw usability as way more important than speed and tech specs.

Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live, and it was to Apple's great fortune that he also happened to be the company's founder.

Those computers that Ive and Jobs worked on became, of course, the iMac--a piece of hardware designed with an unprecedented user focus, all the way to the handle on top, which made it easy to pull out of the box. ("That's the great thing about handles," Ive told Fast Company in 1999. "You know what they're used for.") That single moment in the basement with Ive says a great deal about what made Jobs the most influential innovator of our time. It shows an ability to see a company from the outside, rather than inside as a line manager. He didn't see the proto iMac as a liability or a curiosity. He saw something that was simply better than what had preceded it, and he was willing to bet on that instinct. That required an ability to think first and foremost as someone who lives with technology rather than produces it.

PEOPLE OFTEN SAY that Jobs is a great explainer of technology--a charismatic, plainspoken salesman who is able to bend those around him into a "reality distortion field." But his plainspokenness had force because he always talked about how wondrous it would be to use something, to actually live with it and hold it in your hands. If you listen to Jobs's presentations over the years, he comes across not as the creator of a product so much as its very first fan--the first person to digest its possibilities.
It's when Jobs has fancied himself the chief creator, rather than first fan, that Apple has stumbled. His much ballyhooed Apple Cube, which was in fact a successor to the NeXT cube he'd developed, was an $1,800 dud. Even before his hiatus from Apple, in 1985, his meddling and micromanagement had gotten out of control. But the years away reportedly helped him begin ceding more responsibilities to others. He became less enamored of tech for tech's sake. He blossomed into a user-experience savant. A reporter who asked Jobs about the market research that went into the iPad was famously told, "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." It's not that Jobs doesn't think like a consumer--he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past. He is a focus group of one, the ideal Apple customer, two years out. As he told Inc. magazine in 1989, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

Jobs has been criticized for exhibiting a ruthless and arbitrary perfectionism, scrapping a product because it didn't feel right, because some minor feature like a power button or a home screen seemed unresolved. (He notoriously tore through three prototypes of the iPhone in 2007 before finally giving the okay; he berated Ive over the details of the USB port in the first iMac.) But that interpretation is unsophisticated. A myopic focus on details can destroy as much value as it creates. (Think about how often you've sat through a meeting with a boss who harped on details, killing an idea before you had a chance to explain what it could be.) Jobs certainly did not destroy value. True, he killed far more ideas than he let live--there are more than 300 patents under his name covering everything from packaging to user interfaces. But those that survive outweigh all the rest. His focus was, continually, on what it would be like to come at a product raw, with no coaching or presentation but simply as a new, untested thing.


source: www.fastcompany.com
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