Guy Kawasaki: What I learned from Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Guy Kawasaki: What I learned from Steve Jobs

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161 pointsdm842 comments

I usually find a lot of fluff in Guy Kawasaki's rhetoric, but a lot of this content was actually meaningful. For once I think Guy's not so concerned of his reputation as an iconoclast or coming up with an ostensibly unconventional opinion that this comes off as somewhat genuine.

I was skeptical.

Customers don't know what they need? You can't go wrong with big fonts and big graphics? Experts don't know what they are talking about?

These lessons may work sometimes, but to generalize them across all people, companies and scenarios can lead to major mistakes.

I would argue that this is an approach that works only in mature consumer products.

Ask a 50+ iPad/iPhone owner what they love about their smart phone or tablet and you will find that ease of use, ease of seeing and low threshold of understanding (or the illusion of) is 90% of the experience.

Conversely, the early adopter/tech-savvy market despises the 'training wheels' that come with a lot of 'farmville' products.

Design your product for the market you are targeting.

How can you argue that it only works in mature products? The point was about revolutionary rather than evolutionary change. Or am I missing what you mean?

When the market is mature, there will be a lot of competitors. Incremental/evolutionary change therefore doesn't reap big rewards.

If you want the big rewards, you've got to identify a new and radically better way to let the customers achieve whatever it is they're trying to do (in service of which they're buying the products currently on the market). Then you get to invent a new product category that is so obviously useful to people that they'll pay big bucks for it.

(Random anecdote: last week I was on a trans-Atlantic flight. (Premium economy, not economy.) Looking left: guy in the seat to my left had an iPad. Looking at my own lap: an iPad. Looking to my right: another iPad. I reckon of the 7 seats in my row, 4 or more were occupied by travellers with iPads. The iPad might not be a Mac/Windows/Ubuntu PC replacement, but as a gizmo for keeping the long-haul traveller entertained in flight it rocks. But if you'd asked most of those travellers what they wanted for flying a couple of years ago, they'd probably have said "a laptop with a longer battery life".)

I think that your agreeing with me, but do you know what SODaniel is meaning? Is his/her argument that Apple exploited mature markets? I'd like to understand that idea. Is it somehow meaning that Apple products are for 50+ year olds? That's pretty much the opposite of who I see using them, but that's just anecdata.

Customers don't know what they need?

Not usually, no. The customers know what needs they have that are not being met - that's not the same.

See also:

The customer lacks the imagination to ask for what they really need. This is often encapsulated in Henry Ford's apocryphal quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Now this is not to say the customer is stupid; it just means that everybody wanted to get from A to B faster, but since they only can imagine doing so on a horse, that is what they ask for. And, had they talked to a horse breeder, that is what he would promise them; and when they got their 10% faster horse, they would have been happy. The "project" would have been a success. But would you rather manage the horse breeding project or the Model T?

http://geekherding.blogspot.com/2010/07/requirements-dont-gr...

Henry Ford never actually said that. Strange but true.

Were you there when he didn't say it?

</joke>

Yeah. Me 'n Hen used to throw rocks at people on horses while we blazed by 'em in his new hotrod, etc.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106

Which is why the GP called it an apocryphal quote.

Generally it's not a good idea to say things like that to large audiences, due to exactly what you're pointing out here -- it will misunderstood, and taken literally.

For the correct individual, all of those statements drive home the importance breaking of mental constructs -- literally. That's the root point.

Again, everything GK was talking about, SJ tries to explain the root of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&t=12m33s

How about this one: "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink."

FTFY; 'Guy Kawasaki: What I learned from Steve Jobs one more time, because there is nothing sad about 100k more page-views'

The video has a lot of good stuff in addition to the lessons he learned - http://video.svb.com/video/12-Lessons-Steve-Jobs-Taught-Gu#c...

> Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?

wow. i would much rather 'be' xerox parc. i think that they brought infinitely more value to the human race and probably had a lot more fun doing it. the author is nuts.

I wouldn't say he's nuts per se, but he's comparing apples and oranges.

People left PARC because they wanted to actually ship something. Putting actual products in the hands of real people was and is not something that PARC does.

"infinitely"?

Xerox PARC's biggest legacy was refining ideas from other people (Douglas Englebart, the folks who created Simula, et al) and then _not shipping them_. Sure, PARC prototyped the iPad but it was really invented by Stanley Kubrick or one of his production designers wasn't it?

If you're in the "Apple stole everything from someone else" camp then at least trace back the origins of everything to Maxwell and Faraday and Ada Lovelace and the medieval monks who invented logic and Euclid and don't just go one step back.

We _all_ stand on giants' shoulders. Not all of us help popularize the personal computer, the graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, computer animation, digital music players that fit in your pocket and hold your entire music library, and pocket-sized always-connected touch-screen computers.

I think this advice is the best:

"Customers cannot tell you what they need."

this is a summarized transcript of his talk here:

http://video.svb.com/video/12-Lessons-Steve-Jobs-Taught-Gu#c... Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki

I think the reason it reads bland is that it is a short summary. I found his talk amusing and better presented than what he listed here.

"Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?"

Am I the only one who would rather be in Xerox PARC than Apple? :)

I had javascript disabled and got a blank screen when I first navigated to the URL above. Just had to laugh!8-))

This is a repost. I once respected Kawasaki, however he has turned into a huge social media spammer and baiter.

Guy is a very insightful person, fallen victim to the 'The more people that hear me, the more I matter' theorem.

Can you give a little background for someone who's not as familiar with GK?

The first post was killed for some unknown reason. Are Kawasaki articles banned from Hacker News?

Also, the ad hominem seems out of place. Is he wrong or uninteresting in this case?

It would be ad hominem if I were trying to prove the claims of this article incorrect by critiquing him personally, but I clearly wasn't trying to disprove the claims of the article.

Citing wikipedia: "Gratuitous verbal abuse or "name-calling" itself is not an ad hominem or a logical fallacy.[8][13][14][15][16] In order to become a fallacy, the insult would need to be given as a reason for believing some conclusion. An example would be, "X is idiotically ignorant [of politics], so why should we listen to him now?""

Also, "Is he wrong or uninteresting in this case?" is a false dilemma.

You are correct. Absent any attempt to address points actually made, it cannot be ad hominem.

Is there a way to find out whether a story was killed (besides noticing a sudden drop in the ranking)?

In this case, the only way I know is that I had the comments page of the old thread loaded. When I refreshed the page, [dead] appeared in the title and replying was disabled. Now, I'm unable to find it, so I'm not sure, and the comments that were there are not here.

Ah! HN doesn't display [dead] when you're the submitter of the story. Now I only wonder _why_ it was killed ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088810

I think the first post may have been deleted because it had "[good!]" in the title and got flagged. It would have been easier to remove the "[good!]", but it's likely that it got killed automatically before an admin could edit it.

All of these lessons can be learned in any McDonalds store. Just act like you're getting inspiration from Steve Jobs instead of a random guy. The lesson a person with almost 60 years of life experience may not learn is, how does this opportunist self promotion look.

bullshit

I took tip 1 and stopped reading

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