To Be Profitable: Focus On The Customer, Not Profits.

(updated below) I finally had the chance to watch the Steve Jobs presentation on the iPhone 4 antennae issue. You can watch it here. I was impressed by this statement in Job's opening remarks:

We want to make ... all our users happy.  If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple. We love making our users happy. That's what drives us to make these products in the first place.

Look, everyone has an opinion about Apple. And I have no special insight into how things actually work inside the organization. But it's fair to say that Apple's customers tend to be a very happy and devoted bunch. And its huge profits are clearly the result of staying customer-driven, by consistently turning out products people want.

As a result of focusing on the customer, rather than directly on profits, they're very profitable. Students of Lean will understand that this is not, in fact, a paradox. For long-term success in Apple's particular market, "Customer Focus" cannot be just an empty marketing slogan.

Stephen Covey alludes to this in Principle Centered Leadership. Businesses focused on profits will, in the long term, cease to be profitable. Businesses focused on higher principles - the reason they're in business in the first place -- will thrive. Apple seems to be a good example of this in practice.

Bonus Steve Jobs: To follow up on an earlier post about creative problem solving, I noticed when he said: "We want to find out what the real problem is before we start to come up with solutions."

Update:  Is buying Apple a mythical experience?  See this interesting post from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.  (via Kottke)

(Photo credit: Apple Store)

Toddler Mode For The iPhone

If you've got young ones around, you really need this to share your device without risking your data and identity:

You know how iPhone and iPad have “airplane mode”, which turns off all connectivity? Right under that, I want “Toddler Mode”. When switched on, you’ll get a dialog letting you know you are entering Toddler Mode, and an explanation of how to get out. Unlike Airplane Mode, you can’t get out of Toddler Mode through settings, because there’s no way Toddler Mode should allow access to the settings panel. I haven’t figured out the best way out of Toddler Mode, but I’m thinking a quick triple-click on the home button, followed by a swipe, should work.

I confess: our household once fell victim to such an "early adopter."

This really should be a standard feature for mobile devices. And you'd think the emergency services folks would have lobbied for this by now.

(via Kottke)

It's the Network, Stupid

It's official in my book.  At least for the near future, network performance is the limiting reagent for computing:

"Carrier networks aren’t set to handle five million tablets sucking down 5 gigabytes of data each month,” Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, said.

Wireless carriers have drastically underestimated the network demand by consumers, which has been driven largely by the iPhone and its applications, he said. “It’s only going to get worse as streaming video gets more prevalent.”

An hour of browsing the Web on a mobile phone consumes roughly 40 megabytes of data. Streaming tunes on an Internet radio station like Pandora draws down 60 megabytes each hour. Watching a grainy YouTube video for the same period of time causes the data consumption to nearly triple. And watching a live concert or a sports event will consume close to 300 megabytes an hour.

Debates over the 16 nm node barrier and other theoretical limits of Moore's Law are certainly more interesting.  But in terms of what really constrains our ability to use technology, I think network issues will predominate.

Most people I know are reasonably happy with the speed of their computing devices, especially with newer devices.  But who doesn't wish for faster connectivity?

It's interesting how the size of operating systems are leveling off, or even getting smaller, and virtualization is helping to maximizing existing infrastructure.  Homegrown processing power is a sideshow.  The network is the main event.  Witness the rise of web apps, cloud computing, internet media, gaming, and an increasingly mobile or remotely-based workforce.  The trends don't bode well.

I'm not sure why industry was unprepared for this.  It's not as if these trends were unforeseeable. How we solve this emerging problem should be interesting.

D. Mark Jackson