Steve! It's time to acknowledge the customers' voice.. here's mine! (Part 1)

Check this out.. Steve  Jobs and John Landry in the early 80's when he came TO VISIT ME at McCormack and Dodge (M&D).  That didn't even happen when I was CTO at Lotus!  By then, Apple had turned it around and I had to make the pilgrimage to Sunnyvale instead.

For those not as old as I (about 99% of the US population!) M&D was a mainframe applications powerhouse which I had the great fortune to be a late founder and CTO of from 1974 through its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet in 1983.

Steve was visiting us was due to the fact that M&D was in a lead position in getting those big-ass mainframes to talk bi-directionally to them little-ass DOS PCs (1-2-3 in particular) and we both thought there might be something we could do with Apple too.

Steve was great to talk to, really had a grip a new world of graphical computing, but was grinding under the Microsoft wheel already and had a slight and justifiable chip on his shoulder given his obvious superiority of vision.  After all, MS was still in clunky DOS character mode against Steve's early, but deathly slow, first gen  Macs. That would have put the year as '84, the year the Mac was introduced, but I think we both look too young.  I would have been in my mid-30's if that was the case, yet it looks like I wasn't even shaving!  Even worse, I look like a J. Crew poster child against Steve's West Coast black vibe... what was I thinking?

Like many tech visionaries, Steve is short on patience, does not suffer fools well, and can be hard on both his own staff, his board and increasingly even his customers. Nonetheless, we hit it off well - arrogance attracts! We both supported the notion that customers need to be led.. they're able to incrementally advance the current state of the art, but will never create a disruptive shift provided by a totally new solution.  That's the job of technologists --  hands on technologists who are able to synthesize a new vision atop a new set of capabilities just presented.  Customers will then enthusiastically migrate from the old to the new, and begin suggesting incremental enhancement to the new product.  And that cycle creates great opportunities.

Stating this tech-leads-customers argument normally sends shivers through the marketing and sales operatives, but it's true.  To disarm them, I always use the paper 13-column Wilson-Jones accounting pad as an example.  The customers might have suggested to Wilson-Jones that they lessen the reflection of the paper by muting the color -- but meanwhile  Bob Frankston and Dan Briklin were at MIT building an electronic 13-column accounting pad called VisiCalc. Neither Wilson-Jones nor their customers ever thought of it and soon the paper accounting pad market collapsed!  Lesson: Never depend on your customers for breakthrough ideas - they come from practical technologists.  

At our meeting, Steve was right on the cusp of that kind of breakthrough with the first Macs. Who cares if the processors weren't fast enough then to run the OS.. it will come. So what if there was no hard disk, that memory was grossly insufficient and as opposed to the PCs, there were no apps.. live with it!  This is a breakthrough!  Don't you get it?

And so set the attitude of Steve's personal relationship with customers that has evolved over the years, culminating literally today with the unbelievable statement regarding the iPhone 4 antenna problems,  "you're holding the phone wrong".   My fear is that as he's getting older, he's seems to be getting both grumpier and dictatorial.  He's had a few tough years health-wise so I'm not surprised.  But in an increasingly large and competitive mobile space, that's not going to be a winning approach.  I may be wrong - after all his market cap now exceeds Microsoft.

I really respect all that he and Apple has done, but there's a dramatic intensification of attitude over the last few months.  I think this time he really DOES need to listen to customers -- particularly this one.  I'm here to help!

More to come!