Customer vs. Steve Jobs

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company once said:

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

his point being that it is possible to meet customer needs better than customers can envision.

Steve Jobs embraced the above philosophy. In 1985, he was quoted as saying:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.”

This was shortly after he was fired from Apple.

Now, here's a quote from 2000:
“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’”

Same content, but there is one very important difference. The customer may not be able to see Henry Ford's vision of a car, but when presented with a car, the customer must agree that the car is better than a horse, even a faster one. The Steve that returned to Apple in 1996 showed far greater respect for this fact that the Steve that had been fired in 1984.