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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I always am skeptical about this idea that "great marketers make great products". I mean of course marketing is important to sell stuff, and of course people want to think that they have a major contribution into the success of their company, but...

Take the iPhone. My first iPhone was a 3G. I did not buy it because Steve Jobs convinced me: I bought it because a friend had one, I tried it and it was actually pretty cool. I had tried a PDA before, and did not feel like buying one. No storytelling there, just a product that was a better fit at a better time.

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It existed at all because Steve Jobs convinced the people working on it to believe in it enough to care. This is really rare, most people don't care (and are rational not to) but it is required to make any great product

I think this revisionist history is accidental, but the five point touchscreen was invented at a university by grad students not apple

Jobs might have convinced apple to have a vision, but it didn’t mean they invented all the pieces out of thin air. Timing in tech was just right

Or rather, because Steve took great care not to hire the bozos most companies are staffed with. This is an extremely difficult and underappreciated thing to do, and Steve himself failed spectacularly at it on at least one occasion (which probably made him even more cautious).

People often mix marketing and sales. For me marketing is about "understanding your market". You wanted an iPhone because His Steveness knew what many people were looking for in a phone.

(The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).

The "Product" is part of the "Marketing Mix". But these days, marketing means spamming ads, social media and seo.

Marketing in essence is market making. Producer, Consumer. Product, Customer.

You missed the other horror of modern marketing. Using the thing sold to you, that you paid for, to trap you in endless marketing hell.

I don't mean using it, eg to visit a social media site or whatever. I mean, the device spamming you with ads and "helpful hints' about more products to buy.

Like Google and Android not shutting up about Gemini, nagging you to try it. Or dark patterns to trick you into subscribing to a service.

I should refine my original comment: good marketing is about meeting the right people with the right message at the right time.

That kind of persistent nagging is the wrong time, with the wrong message at the wrong people.

Right. Yeah I often do, possibly because I only have one word (marketing) for both.

I guess the storytelling is the part that I feel is overvalued. "This genius changed the world because of how he phrased it" seems like bullshit to me.

The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters. Even though I feel like there is a whole lot more luck involved than what people want to think. "Steve Jobs was a genius" may rather be "Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses".

It feels like there is a lot of survivorship bias (let me link xkcd myself before someone does: [1]) that we keep ignoring. "If Musk/Besos/Zuckerberg/<name your crazy billionaire> is where he is, that's most likely because he is the best". Ok, they probably did something right (maybe?), but they got crazy lucky as well.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1827/

> The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters

From the article "It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built."

The story is what kept the product development on track - and thus made the iPhone sell itself - the story isn't about convincing the public to buy, the story was an encapsulation of the products design - refined as time went on.

Product dev can easily go off the rails - take the recent story about Jeep having Ads popup on their infotainment systems - people wondering how anybody could think that's a good idea.

If you told a story about that product feature to your family and friends - you can be sure you'd get the 'puzzled look', and you'd remove it before the car ever shipped.

Apple doesn't really do a lot of classic sales. They have people with enterprise accounts and so forth but most of what they do to tell you about products and get people to write about them is fairly classic marketing.

But to your other point, sure. There is a saying about helping to make your luck, but, yes, there is also luck in just about any career or success.

> Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses

Jobs did it multiple times, though. The iPhone no doubt overshadows everything else, but the Macintosh and iPod serve as evidence that he had a recipe for successful products.

So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs) and not about "marketing" (how to define the markets for a product and why people in these marketing will buy it...).

As I understand it, for example, there's markets for "broken watches": it can be

* broken luxury watches: to have a "rich man look" without paying the full price

* for hobbyist watch-repair

* for professional watch ressellers (after repair)

* for educational / museum...

As far as design is concerned, the watch is broken. But it can be sold if you find who will buy it and why... and that's marketing

Jobs was a great designer too... (and/or knew how to hire great designers and let them get out the best of them)

> So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs)

Sure. I guess my point is that its "product design" was essentially "it's a PDA with more modern technology". It did not look extra-terrestrial back then, it really looked like a better PDA.

In other examples, I have seen product people saying that they had the "vision" of connecting their app to the cloud. Or more recently, "visionaries" will suggest integrating LLMs in everything they can describe (they would suggest writing an LLM driver in the kernel if they knew the word "kernel"). And then, maybe, one such integration will work, and they will say "I had this vision that we should integrate LLM here" and forget the part where 99% of their ideas were worthless, and the one that work was actually not a revolutionary idea but just something that technically worked.

Again, not to say that Steve Jobs was not good. He certainly brought a lot. But sometimes I feel like we overdo it a bit.

> it's a PDA with more modern technology

Lots of people, including Apple with the Newton, tried to build a really great PDA - some people loved them, most found them too complex and slow.

I'd argue that when the iPhone originally shipped ( remember on shipping it didn't have an App store or even a custom app story - Steve said just write a web app ), it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

In my view it wasn't trying to be a PDA at all - all that came later.

> it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

Sure, but again not revolutionary. I had a Nokia that was a phone, a web browser and a music player. The iPhone was just better at that, but not very different in the end.

Sure everything is incremental - but I think you are missing the key feature of the iPhone that really changed how you interacted with it.

A really great multi-touch screen - sure there were touch devices before - and even multitouch ones, but my recollection was they would both miss/confuse inputs and have significant input lag and most were single input - the iPhone just worked as you'd expect - it felt magical. 'You got me at scrolling'

If you take a great touch experience, and a software user interface rather than buttons, then you have a platform with infinitely reconfigurable interaction modes.

Form is function. The user interface ( in the broadest sense of how you interact with the computer ) is key. They delivered touch that worked, in a form factor you could hold.

One of the reasons ChatGPT feels revolutionary is it has changed how people interact with their computers - creating a new conversational mode - ( and sure Eliza goes back a long way as well - but that was a toy ).

Marketing is the process of finding out what people want, how to make it, and then how to communicate to them that the thing you made is that.

Even if Steve never crossed your path, his marketing process is how Apple arrived at the product you wanted.

Right, yeah I should have said "storytellers" instead of "marketers".

Remember during this time he and Apple were riding high on the success of the iPod. So when he drums up excitement about being just as revolutionary with phones, people listened.

A good product and word of mouth is way more effective than marketing

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