Yeah but that's exactly my point - it's easy to have abstract ideas; just read a SciFi book. It's a lot harder to work out the non-obvious details of how this device should look and feel and how it should operate and be operated. There's nothing obvious about the click-wheel, for instance, but it was such a cool, analogue interface paradigm. I think it was extremely original, and it fit the iPod so perfectly; I'm convinced that it's a big reason it was so successful.
It was... Simple. The UI didn't get in the way of itself. Steve Jobs was notoriously hard to work with, but the idea of a person in management effectively FORCING you to think differently about a product is very different than the way most corporations worked.
Case in point: Sony. Sony, with their venerable Walkman brand, could have OWNED THE MP3 MARKET! They could have literally dictated the direction of that nascent market. What killed them? What hobbled every product they made? 'Marketing decisions'. They were trying to save their CD and music businesses and made the product a hot mess of DRM, and cumbersome UI and a bitch to sync. Bad decisions.
I'm not saying Jobs was personally responsible for every great decision, but he was clearly very opinionated and involved (see: folklore.org), and clearly didn't just dismiss ideas that were radically different because the "market wouldn't accept it" or other business-people BS. It takes balls to release something like the iPod when all your competitors looked and worked so differently. They basically bet-the-company on the iPhone. It could have flopped; maybe people wouldn't pay that much for a phone, or they wouldn't get used to the on-screen keyboards or something.
And how many insanely great ideas are killed by corporations because it might cannibalize one of their other, viewed by management 'sacred', markets? Many say that the iPhone killed the iPod. True, to a point. I don't think that Apple should EVER kill the iPod Touch, but for a lot of people, yes, the iPhone killed their iPod desires. I personally have quite a few iPods, and when doing any long distance traveling, ALWAYS take my iPod just for the reason that I can 'kill' my iPod listening to music, playing games, and reading, and save my iPhone battery so that it's still workable for a fun filled day when I get where I need to be. Landing in a foreign country with a dead iPhone isn't a great idea.
You need to really understand the product and the customers in order to have the conviction to do those things. Most companies are run by networkers; smiley-faced idiots who look the part and can chit-chat with investors. They are basically sales/marketing people. They will never have the conviction to make such bold and original products.
You have to have a butt load of cash too. Cash is what Steve Jobs gifted Apple with. He 'bet the farm' on the iPod, and coupled with the ending of many products that didn't have a future, he helped rebuild Apple's cash stores. Apple could have survived the failing of the iPad longer than Microsoft hobbled with the Zune. (Which points out a flaw in the marketing of the Zune. Release a product no one is sure will last in 'brown'? The turd jokes just wrote themselves, didn't they) Being a 'marketing guy' was the brush people wanting Apple to die painted Tim Cook with. Who knows what would have happened if Jobs would have beaten his cancer. Maybe they made a good team. Maybe Apple needed a more geeky ****** to take over to try to replace Steve Jobs. *shrug*
Steve Jobs
had some words on this as well. If your company doesn't have the conviction to do new things with their products, they can only get better by improved sales/marketing, so that's who ends up running the company. Look at Microsoft - when Bill Gates retired, who took over? Steve Ballmer, the sales guy. Sales tripled, profits doubled, but they totally missed the revolution in cloud computing, ceding that space to the likes of Google and Amazon. They actually managed to fix it, which they don't get enough credit for, by replacing Ballmer with Satya Nadella, the former head of the cloud computing group. These days they are much more respected than they were under Ballmer, and much better-positioned for the future.
Marketing decisions have killed many ideas, and marketing has killed many a company. However, one could also say that marketing, or the intrinsic 'usability' and 'look and feel' of a product was integrated at the highest level at Apple. If anything Jobs had a keen eye for 'simple things', and knew that 'simple things', or the ability to make complex devices seem simple would sell a lot of stuff. Another way of looking at his comments are that if you aren't able to defend your product, and don't think that it's the best 'x' in that market, you aren't going to succeed. But on the flip side, if you don't have a product that you believe in, and was designed 'for the people', and not to protect precious corporate turf, you will fail too.
The click wheel. Some could say 'genius', but what other way was there to do that at the time? Many players had buttons to scroll through tracks, or roller discs. Placing the surface perpendicular to the user was a different way to view the selection process. Showing icons, and allowing people to move them, and organize them on separate screen in the beginning was a different way to view the function.
But, Sony dropped the ball, and all of the other companies too. They let inside forces control their design, and those inside forces really weren't vary good at design and how things COULD work.
Good post. Great comments...