The Customer Is a Clueless King

In an article in the NYT covering the first day of the Apple-Samsung court case over smartphone patents, I came across these two paragraphs:

One other witness from Apple, Philip Schiller, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, briefly took the stand before the court adjourned for the day. He was asked about influences on the company’s products.

“We don’t use any customer input in the new product process,” Mr. Schiller said. “We never go and ask the customer, ‘What feature do you want in the next product?’ It’s not the customer’s job to know. We accumulate that information ourselves.”

That last quote is something software developers, designers, and anyone else tasked with gathering customer requirements should really take to heart. Yes, the customer is always king, but that doesn’t mean that the king can coherently articulate what he wants. To please the king, sometimes it takes a bit of ‘benevolent tyranny.’

This reminded me of a well-known TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell on “Choice, happiness, and spaghetti sauce” in which he essentially makes the point that people don’t really know what they want when the thing they want doesn’t yet exist.

In that talk, Gladwell also mentions this lovely, apparently Yiddish, saying: “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” I assume this does not mean the sauce, but the plant in the soil. Regardless, horseradish is, especially to a worm, an irritant and so this is to say the worm can’t dream of a life free of the pain it has always known.

Which I guess is the same point as above.

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