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The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of
by sriramk 17y ago
The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited.
Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.
Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.
Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.
- marcusbooster 17y agoDoesn't do focus groups on products designed and designed again from the bottom to the top? They even say so in their jobs faq: Apple hires quality assurance engineers for internal product testing...We also create focus groups to provide feedback on our products. http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/pro/inside/questions.html http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/pro/inside/questions.html
- sriramk 17y agoI'm going by Ive's interview plus off-hand comments I've heard from ex-Apple employees http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/01/a-fireside-chat-with-apples-jonathan-ive/ http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/01/a-fireside-c...
- jmtulloss 17y agoWhen you have 10,000 employees (or however many they have now), it's very possible to do focus groups and usability testing completely internally. A startup with 3 guys, not nearly as easy.
- marcusbooster 17y agoThe "We don’t do focus groups" statement from that article is referring to how Apple decides what products to build, not how they are built.
- sriramk 17y agoYou're probably correct. I doubt that even Jobs and Ive are superhuman enough to build the right product at the beginning. I do wonder how they do this with their culture of secrecy. Any focus group they run must be quite small or they must be splitting up their focus group tests. For example, I remember reading a story about someone testing out the iPhone UI alone in a contraption in a box as opposed to the real hardware.
- weaksauce 17y agoI heard a while back that they would intentionally use fake products for testing to see what group leaked the information. Kind of like having a watermark in the review copies of the movies given to the academy and sundance.
- grinich 17y agoFor example, I remember reading a story about someone testing out the iPhone UI alone in a contraption in a box as opposed to the real hardware. Why is this a problem? Other than having multitouch capability, the UI didn't depend on the hardware at all.
- GHFigs 17y agoDoing focus groups to get feedback on your existing product isn't the same as doing them for products in development.
- Semiapies 17y agoThe downside of the "great man" setup is that Apple was not at all impressive without Steve Jobs at the helm. Uninspiring to outright bad Mac models, Microsoft putting out a superior OS for a time, etc. To be glib, with Jobs, you get the Wired "Evil Genius" cover story on Apple - and without Jobs, you get the old "Pray" cover story on Apple.