Yesterday, we posted a survey that reported half of all employees would tell friends and family not to come work from their employer.
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I got curious and dug a little deeper …
Archive for the ‘Jobs, Steve’ Category
A new twist on “Press or say ‘one’ if …”
January 10, 2014First, let’s lay down a marker by flashing back to the late Steve Jobs.
One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on.
To motivate the designers, Jobs reportedly exhorted them:
“If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?”.
The engineer allowed that he probably could.
Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.
A few weeks later the engineer had the Mac booting up twenty-eight seconds faster.
Keep that story in mind the next time that a digitized phone answerer asks you to “press or say 1 for English; press or say 2 for Spanish”.
Not a big deal, right?
It only takes about 5 seconds to work thru the prompts.
But take Jobs rules and multiply the 5 seconds times a few million calls per day getting the prompt and you’ve got a statistically significant number of “lost lives” … or at least, lost productivity.
Rather than getting better, it’s getting worse.
I have proof.
“It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
August 26, 2011That was what Steve Jobs has has been saying for years.
The statement seems to be rippling through the marketing community now that Jobs has resigned.
NY Times, Without Its Master of Design, Apple Will Face Many Challenges
Mr. Jobs explained that his design decisions were shaped by his understanding of both technology and popular culture.
His own study and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide.
When a reporter asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
What’s the rub?
Jobs’ success flies in the face of marketers who spend time and energy arguing for and doing extensive consumer research (surveys. focus groups, etc.).
And, it’s hard to argue with his success,
Hmmm.
The Homa Files 