Leading Apple With Steve Jobs by Jay Elliot

Author:Jay Elliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Steve Describes His Product-Creation Process

In 2007, Steve introduced the iPhone to the world. In his very lengthy (but, as always, gripping) remarks, he described the motivation and process that led to the new phone. The following is Steve Jobs, verbatim, and it’s worth studying because it provides one of the best views ever of how his mind worked. Note the language, as well—not at all the stuffy formality you would expect from the CEO of a giant global company. It’s very you and me.

Steve Jobs:

Smart phones are definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder to use. They’re really complicated. Just for the basic stuff people have a hard time figuring out how to use them. Well, we don’t want to do either one of these things. What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. Okay?

So, we’re going to reinvent the phone. Now, we’re going to start with a revolutionary user interface. It is the result of years of research and development, and of course, it’s an interplay of hardware and software.

Why do we need a revolutionary user interface? Here’s four smart phones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62—the usual suspects. And what’s wrong with their user interfaces?

Well, the problem with them is . . . they all have these keyboards that are there whether or not you need them to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application.

Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can’t run around and add a button to these things. They’re already shipped.

So what do you do? It doesn’t work because the buttons and the controls can’t change. They can’t change for each application, and they can’t change down the road if you think of another great idea you want to add to this product.

Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it! We solved it in computers twenty years ago. We solved it with a bit-mapped screen that could display anything we want. Put any user interface up.

And a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. We solved this problem. So how are we going to take this to a mobile device?

What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. Now, how are we going to communicate this? We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do?

Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus.

No!

Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em and put ’em away, and you lose ’em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.

We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world.

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