Cult of Mac covers a Wharton analysis of recent Apple announcements:
Giant Off-base Conclusion No. 1: Design is just about being cool.
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but in the United States, the vast majority of people still don’t understand what good design is really about. Good design is not about aesthetics. It’s about solving people’s needs. It’s about clarifying the complex. It’s about looking good AND working better. People care a little bit about features. They care way more about knowing how to use them. Here’s Fader’s take:And, I think on the feature side, it doesn’t really have that many features. In fact, it’s missing some really, really important features. What it has [going] for it is just a really cool design factor and that’s not enough. It’s going to help them to differentiate themselves from the other phones out there, but it’s not going to be enough to really be a winning entry.
Does he know what he’s even arguing in terms of design here? The breakthrough on the iPhone is not how it looks. It’s how it works. Don’t look at the appearance of the interface, look at how brilliantly the iPhone switches modes and hooks its features into one another. It’s about integration AND intuition. You don’t have to make trade-offs.
Different people have opinions on which feature is the most important – Apple needs to address the concerns of the mass market demand, not the whine of technolphiles. It’s also very telling that Fader doesn’t identify one feature which he thinks is important.
Cult of Mac didn’t cover this part so I’ll do it:
Knowledge@Wharton: Do you have any final advice for Apple or any other PC company that’s trying to transition into the home entertainment business?
Fader: Absolutely. Make customers happy; give them what they want. And that means to Apple, open up the systems to try to accommodate other formats and try to work with other firms. That’s really, really important. When you constrain people — when you tell people, “We can give you anything that you want but here are the limitations on it” — that’s going to be a real limit to a firm’s growth and success.
What Fader is talking about is making Microsoft, Napster, and Apple competitors happy, not their consumers. Apple is under no obligation to appease or acquiesce to the demands of their competitors or critics. 21.1 million people bought iPods last quarter and, by all appearances, Apple has made their ownership a happy one.
