Customers first

There’s been a lot of eulogising for Steve Jobs in the past couple of days. There’s been much comment about how he changed a lot of lives (undoubtedly), some about his “unusual” style of management (read: “autocratic”), and a few that have maybe started to stretch the truth a bit already (no – he wasn’t the greatest inventor since Edison. He was many things, but he was not an inventor.)

I was listening to the Guardian’s TechWeekly tribute this morning, and there was a fascinating statement about the way in which at the 1997 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Jobs deflected heavy criticism of the impending change in Mac operating system from developers present by telling them that the important people for Apple to address weren’t the developers – but Apple’s end customers.

That I believe, more than anything, sums up how Jobs was able to set Apple apart from the rest of the IT industry. Whilst many will focus on the design of the products, or the great marketing, actually it is easy to see that the root cause of their success comes from putting people (not technologists) first. There are few, if any, other technology companies that do the same.