egoCheese, brian barbutti

O Steve Jobs deu uma entrevista para a última edição da Fortune e ela pode ser encontrada aqui. Fantástico. Minha versão resumida e com comentários segue.

---

Sobre a utilidade de pesquisa de marketing, discussões em grupo e afins. É o ponto que eu sempre fiz nas minhas aulas de pesquisa na faculdade; é útil para alguns poucos casos, mas grande parte das escolhas é instinto, lógica e raciocínio. Pesquisa é uma ferramenta absurdamente sobrestimada.

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘

We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

---

Sobre foco. É um dos motivos porque a Apple tem tantos seguidores… quando ela lança um produto, você já sabe de todo o processo que ele passou até chegar na loja e sabe que ele é bom. Vai tentar acompanhar os lançamentos da Sony, da HP ou da Dell. Esquece, você fica louco.

Indiretamente, o ponto cai no paradoxo das extensões de linha e de produto que eu falei em 2005 (!!).

Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

---

Sobre a luta pela perfeição (e indiretamente sobre como deve ser tenso trabalhar na Apple).

Well, you know what? It’s been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too…. Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’

And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’

---

Para quem ainda tem dúvida do motivo de um Mac ser anos-luz à frente de um PC rodando Windows.

That allows us to innovate at a much faster rate than if we had to wait for Microsoft, like Dell and HP and everybody else does. Because Microsoft has their own timetable, for probably good reasons. I mean Vista took what — seven or eight years? It’s hard to get your new feature that you need for your new hardware if it has to wait eight years. So we can set our own priorities and look at things in a more holistic way from the point of view of the customer.

---

Para fechar, sobre a grande sacada da Apple Store (por sinal, cadê a de São Paulo!?). Eles não acham que querem um Mac…

It was very simple. The Mac faithful will drive to a destination, right? They’ll drive somewhere special just to do that. But people who own Windows - we want to convert them to Mac. They will not drive somewhere special. They don’t think they want a Mac. They will not take the risk of a 20-minute drive in case they don’t like it.

But if we put our store in a mall or on a street that they’re walking by, and we reduce that risk from a 20-minute drive to 20 footsteps, then they’re more likely to go in because there’s really no risk. So we decided to put our stores in high-traffic locations. And it works.