“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”—Steve Jobs
I just spent several days in discussions with a small group of the top people in a technology company where I am on the board. The topic: should we launch a completely new service that we believe will have a huge market potential? The issues: it will take significant time and money to finish and launch it and we haven’t done any market research.
This reminded me not only of Steve Job’s wisdom on this matter but also of the story of the cordless vacuum cleaner. According to Alexandra Wolfe’s article in the Wall Street Journal, market research found that people weren’t especially interested in them. James Dyson’s response to that?
