What vs Why: Customers are asking?
The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking for it.
“fall in love with the problem, not the solution” If you understand the problem space deeply, either many solutions can emerge, or one solution emerges as clearly the best place to focus.
When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users, and their number one complaint was boot time. It took long for the system to boot (around 45s on average at the time). They looked into it but also asked the question, why do people care about boot times at all? At this point, the systems were capable of sleeping, so reboots should be rare.
They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once a day or once a week. While they did improve the boot times, they put more effort into making the OS more stable. When the new release shipped, people stopped complaining about boot time, but not because it was vastly improved, instead because they were doing it less often.
Many people can imagine how they’d solve an immediate problem, but never pause to examine whether or not this solution is ideal, or generalizes beyond a specific situation
One of Steve Jobs stories
According to Mike Slade, he was working at Microsoft around 1990, and Jobs was trying to recruit him to NeXT. (Bear in mind that Microsoft was only a few years from launching its mega-hit Windows 95, while NeXT was struggling to sell computers.)
During a conversation, Jobs told Slade he would find his talents wasted in Seattle. In contrast, Jobs called Silicon Valley a hub of excitement and activity where Slade could blossom.
Jobs then launched into a spontaneous, impassioned speech. He described Palo Alto, California, as a “special place” and likened it to Florence during the Italian Renaissance. There was so much talent in the area, Jobs said, that you could walk down the street and bump into a scholar one moment, an astronaut the next.
Jobs’ off-the-cuff description of the place bowled over Slade. It was a twist on Jobs’ famous pitch to Pepsi CEO John Sculley. (Jobs asked whether Sculley wanted to sell sugar water his whole life or join Apple and change the world.)
After the talk, Slade agreed to pack up his stuff and move to Palo Alto.
Jump forward a year, and Slade and his wife were eating in Il Fornaio, an Italian chain restaurant with a location on University Avenue in Palo Alto.
“We were sitting there, in early ’91, and I’m reading the menu,” Slade recalled. “And on the back of the menu at Il Fornaio it says, ‘Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance…’ And it goes through the whole spiel! The fucking guy sold me a line from the menu! From a chain restaurant!! Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, which was his favorite restaurant, right? Such a shameless bullshitter!”