People often imagine things they don’t do can’t be that hard. Marketing is important because no one will be interested in your product if no one knows about it. Being able to envision products that the average person will want is another one that good business leaders often do.
Steve Jobs, for example, was very good at envisioning what people would be interested in. From the Apple to Macs to the iPod to the iPhone, he hit a lot of winners. This isn’t an endorsement for him owning the company, or even as a person, but he undeniably had a skillet that others around him often lacked.
I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.
Steve Wozniak was an amazing computer geek, and designed an incredibly useful computer for the time. Steve Jobs popularized and marketed the idea. He didn’t do a lot on the technical side. There was the Blackberry and resistive touch phones before the iPhone, and they had serious problems. Anyone could have made the first smartphone - Windows Mobile was released in 2003 and certainly had the money to take on this project - but Apple did. And yes, Apple did a lot to make it painful for their customers to stray from the Apple ecology to the company’s benefit, and the detriment to the market as a whole, which is pretty on-brand for Jobs.
People often imagine things they don’t do can’t be that hard. Marketing is important because no one will be interested in your product if no one knows about it. Being able to envision products that the average person will want is another one that good business leaders often do.
Steve Jobs, for example, was very good at envisioning what people would be interested in. From the Apple to Macs to the iPod to the iPhone, he hit a lot of winners. This isn’t an endorsement for him owning the company, or even as a person, but he undeniably had a skillet that others around him often lacked.
I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.
Steve Wozniak was an amazing computer geek, and designed an incredibly useful computer for the time. Steve Jobs popularized and marketed the idea. He didn’t do a lot on the technical side. There was the Blackberry and resistive touch phones before the iPhone, and they had serious problems. Anyone could have made the first smartphone - Windows Mobile was released in 2003 and certainly had the money to take on this project - but Apple did. And yes, Apple did a lot to make it painful for their customers to stray from the Apple ecology to the company’s benefit, and the detriment to the market as a whole, which is pretty on-brand for Jobs.