Читать книгу Simplify - Richard Koch - Страница 14
ОглавлениеHe made devices simpler by eliminating
buttons, software simpler by eliminating
features, and interfaces simpler by
eliminating options. He attributed his love
of simplicity to his Zen training.
Walter Isaacson
This is the story of a man and a machine that transformed the way we work and play. He distorted and compressed reality, and achieved the impossible by insisting on simplicity and its benefits for customers.
There had been nothing like it before. In the middle of Super Bowl XVIII, immediately after a touchdown, came images conjured up by Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner. Masses of skinheads in an urban wasteland are paying full attention to Big Brother on a huge screen. But then a female athlete wearing a white top labelled “Macintosh” leaps clear of pursuing police to hurl a sledgehammer that smashes the screen and destroys Big Brother. “On January 24th,” announces the voice-over, “Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
The sixty-second commercial cost $750,000 to make and $800,000 to air. But it was well worth it. All three of the main U.S. networks featured stories about the advertisement that night, and the publicity it generated was huge. Advertising Age and TV Guide both later voted it the greatest commercial of all time.
“Big Brother” was a thinly veiled reference to IBM, commonly called “Big Blue.” In October 1983, Business Week had opined that the battle for market supremacy in personal computers “is already over. In a stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26 percent of the market in two years, and is expected to account for half the world market in 1985. An additional 25 percent of the market will be . . . IBM-compatible machines.”1
At the public launch of the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple, attacked IBM directly. After detailing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of the much larger company, he built towards his climax: “It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all . . . and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”2 Jobs had the crowd of journalists and commentators hollering and cheering. Then came a rescreening of the commercial, which generated a standing ovation. It was a dramatic launch for what turned out to be a rather special machine.
The build-up to 1984 had started in the early 1970s, when computer technology began to change and a wave of simplification began, as the microprocessor made computing faster, cheaper, and easier to operate. In 1975, the MITS Altair became the first mass-produced personal computer kit, but it was much less sophisticated — as well as much cheaper — than the many microcomputers that were emerging at the time. For $495, the hobbyist got a pile of parts to solder to a board; even assembled, it was pretty primitive.3
One of those hobbyists was Steve Wozniak; another was his friend, Steve Jobs. In 1975 they began working on the Apple I, a step up from the Altair, but still an unprepossessing machine. The Apple II, a much neater product, quickly followed. The first real packaged computer, it came in a sleek and friendly plastic case modelled on the Cuisinart food processor; and it could be plugged in and used straight out of the box. Its simplicity made the computer a general consumer product for the first time: you didn’t need to be a geek to use it.4
Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, says Jobs “liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the masses . . . he repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple.” In Jobs’ own words, “We will make them bright and pure and honest about being hightech . . . that’s our approach. Very simple . . . the way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”5
Yet the real breakthrough came not with the Apple II but with the work being done at the Xerox PARC research labs at Palo Alto. Jobs secured an invite for himself and his team at the end of 1979 and he was amazed by what he saw. Up to that time, all computers had used command lines that required some operator skill, and there were no user-friendly graphics. But the Xerox engineers had invented the “desktop” — a screen that could have several documents and folders on it at the same time, represented by icons. A device they called a mouse was used to access the one you wanted with a simple click. When he saw this demonstrated, Jobs was captivated. “THIS . . . IS . . . IT!” he exclaimed. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”6
All of these features were included in the Xerox Star. Launched in 1981, it was the first recognizably modern PC. But the Xerox Star retailed at $16,595, and only 30,000 of them were ever sold. If it was to trigger a revolution, the Xerox Star needed to be simplified.7
The Apple Lisa, introduced in January 1983, was the first computer on which users could drag a file across the desktop, drop it into a folder, scroll smoothly through a document, and overlap a series of windows. Through Jobs’ famous WYSIWYG — What You See Is What You Get — the Lisa also enabled users to print off exactly what they saw on the screen. The Lisa 2, introduced a year later, cost $3,495 — about a fifth of the price of a Xerox Star for a greatly superior machine.8 The Macintosh was a further advance — it cost $2,495 and had many charming features that made it both easy and fun to use, including a superb graphics package and a great variety of different fonts, documents, spreadsheets, and other templates.
In truth, the first Mac was far from perfect. Its gorgeous user interface required far more memory than it possessed. Over time, however, the necessary improvements were made, and, as we’ll see later, the appeal of the Mac to a certain type of user — broadly creative types and those who revel in good design — made it a huge long-term commercial success.
But Jobs was not a price-simplifier. One of his early co-conspirators on the Mac project — and the man who named the machine — was Jef Raskin, a young, brilliant, and highly opinionated computer scientist. Raskin wanted to build a computer for the masses, to go into every home — a utopian and preposterous idea, it seemed, at a time when fewer than one in a hundred homes owned computers. His ideal was a machine with a keyboard, a screen, and the computer itself in one unit, priced at $1,000. If Jobs had supported this notion, Apple might have become the Ford Motor Corporation of computers. He could have done so, which would have made him a price-simplifier. But he had a different idea, as Walter Isaacson explains:
“Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises to keep down the cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him to focus on building what he repeatedly called an ‘insanely great’ product. ‘Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,’ Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo.”9
A power struggle ensued. Jobs prevailed; Raskin left the company. In 1984, the Mac was priced at a 25 percent premium to the rival IBM PC, an inferior machine in everyone’s eyes, except for the majority of buyers.
Jobs was not obsessed with price or with the creation of a mass market for his machine. He simplified principally to make his PC better for the user. He made a device that he himself wanted to use. He was not wholly uncommercial: he simplified so that his machines were easier to produce and therefore cheaper; and he introduced some stunning cost savings relative to the Xerox Star. But he reduced cost and price only when doing so did not compromise his main objective, which was to make a fabulous computer. Ease of use, art, and usefulness made his machine a joy to use. Price was important too, but markedly less so. Ever since, no Apple device has been sold primarily on price.
Therefore, Jobs is the first of our second breed of simplifier — those we call proposition-simplifiers — because the overwhelming innovation and advantage lie in the proposition of the product or service, not in its price. In Jobs’ own phrase, the product has to be “insanely great.” In our phrase, the product must be a joy to use; it must have a palpable “wow factor.” Jobs spoke for all the proposition-simplifiers we will meet in this book when he said, “products are everything.”10
By relating the stories of Ford, IKEA, and McDonald’s, we showed that the overwhelming benefit brought to customers by price-simplifiers is a massive price reduction of anything between 50 and 90 percent. This reduction is absolutely essential for price-simplifiers. We then showed that Ford, Kamprad, and the McDonald brothers attempted, where possible, to improve the ease of use, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal (art) of their products, provided this did not conflict at all with the overwhelming aim of a low — and continually lower — price.
With proposition-simplifiers, the position is exactly reversed. Their absolute priority is to make the product or service not just a little better, but a whole order of magnitude better, so that it is recognizably different from anything else on the market. The Macintosh, the iPod, the iPad, and the Apple watch all met this criterion: the proposition was either a great improvement on an existing product or else a totally new, unique creation. It had to be insanely great, a joy to use. At least one of the dimensions we specified as optional extras for price-simplifiers — ease of use, usefulness or art — must be present in a proposition-simplifier’s new product or service. In fact, usually two or three of these benefits must be present; but whether it is one, two or all three of these advantages, they must transform the proposition.
In the case of the Macintosh, all three benefits were evident, with ease of use the most important:
1 Ease of use:Simple to set up and plug in.Escape from the DOS command mentality that was still used in all other machines at the time. Even the path-breaking IBM PC, launched in 1981, used old-fashioned command-line prompts to drive the operating system.The Macintosh operating system, with its desktop and bitmapped graphical displays, was far more intuitive and required less training and expertise than the DOS systems.
2 Usefulness:The ability to store and access documents on the desktop.Overlapping windows that scrolled perfectly.The ability to compose a document and print it exactly as it appeared on the screen.
3 Art:Playful and intuitive icons.Wide range of beautiful fonts.The hardware design was clean and light — an attractive consumer product in comparison with IBM’s gun-metal grey.
These features were the raison d’être of the Macintosh. Price reduction was a subsidiary, much less important objective. In fact, as we shall see later in the book, most proposition-simplified products and services — such as the Mac — sell at a premium to their rivals.
In designing the Lisa and the Mac, Jobs’ reference point was the Xerox Star. He was interested in dramatic cost reduction, but only if it coincided with product improvement. For example, the mouse. The Xerox mouse had three buttons and didn’t roll smoothly. Also, because of its many features, it cost $300. So Jobs commissioned a design house to come up with a $15 mouse with one button and smooth rolling even on a rough surface. Before long, they had developed one.
Jobs’ main purpose was not to re-engineer the Xerox technology to make it commercially viable. He wanted to surpass it — to enable users to move a window around the desktop, drop it into a folder, increase or reduce its size, all simply by manipulating the icon, with no need to select a command before doing so. The Xerox Star couldn’t do any of this. The Mac could do all of it, and more.
Which Type of Simplifying is Better?
It depends:
on what the entrepreneur or executive wants to do,
on what his or her firm is able to do,
on the opposition,
on the market,
on the technology, and
on the time and place.
Neither approach is inherently superior to the other.
The big advantage with price-simplifying is that it is often possible to build a huge mass market and a business system that cannot be imitated and out-scaled easily — at least not after the early days — which effectively shuts out all rivals. The price-simplifier is likely to end up with much higher volume than the proposition-simplifier, for the latter relies on the customer’s willingness to pay a premium for a demonstrably superior product. The rub for proposition-simplifiers is that they need to keep ahead of their rivals through constant innovation and new product development — otherwise, they will lose market share and suffer falling margins. Yet they may be able to build an extremely valuable, loyal following, and brand among the middle to top of any given market. The price-simplifier must price down the experience curve, passing on cost savings and keeping margins tightly constrained. In contrast, the proposition-simplifier can — sometimes — hang on to fat net margins: up to 40 percent in the case of Apple, which at the time of writing was the most valuable company in the world.
The history of computing shows that there can be room for both a price-simplifier and one or more proposition-simplifiers to weave their magic within the same broad market. But any company that tries to pursue an approach that is halfway between the two is destined to fail. The Mac never reached double figures in terms of overall market share, so it never slayed the mighty IBM. What helped IBM and IBM-compatible machines was that Microsoft eventually duplicated most of the features of the Mac’s operating system. Windows 1.0 was not launched until the autumn of 1985, and it was initially a poor imitation of the Mac’s (and even the Xerox’s) operating system. But gradually the gap was closed, especially between 1985 and 1996, when Jobs was exiled from Apple and there was little reinvestment in Macintosh software.
Even so, the laws of simplicity saw to it that IBM was not the main beneficiary of its Faustian pact with Microsoft. IBM continued to be outflanked in terms of product quality by the Mac, and then lost most of its remaining market share to price-simplifiers — initially Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, and later Dell. As a company, IBM was always a reluctant simplifier, pursuing neither proposition-simplifying nor price-simplifying with any great vigour. Over the life of its involvement with PCs, it never made any money from them, bleeding cash to such an extent that the whole firm nearly collapsed. In 2005 Big Blue made its last computer and sold the husk of the business to a Chinese rival, Lenovo.
And what of plucky little Apple? Its share of the computer market fell to just 3 percent during the barren Jobs-less years, but it did just fine after the Second Coming of Steve in 1997. Jobs rationalized the product line, developed new software with impressive wow appeal and, together with the firm’s new design supremo Jony Ive, triumphed with the iMac, launched in 1998 as a desktop computer for the home market. Priced at $1,299, the iMac sold 800,000 units in its first five months, the highest run rate that Apple had ever had.11 During the 2000s, the Mac reached new heights when it became the hub for other Apple devices. It took more than two decades, but proposition-simplifying finally paid off in spades. As with Henry Ford’s price-simplifying, Steve Jobs didn’t reach the summit in a single bound. Self-belief and doggedness eventually proved just as essential as the right strategy.
On the stock market in May 2000, Microsoft was worth twenty times more than Apple. Ten years later, Apple overtook Microsoft, and a year later it was worth 70 percent more than its chief rival.12 As we write, Apple is worth $742 billion.
In 2010, Macintosh’s global market share in computers was just 7 percent, yet it accounted for 35 percent of the industry’s operating profits,13 higher than any other company. Apple created and dominated the top segment of the PC market and was rewarded with very attractive returns.
Without Apple, it is unlikely that computers today would be so elegant and easy to use. Without Apple, the desktop we all take for granted today might not have become the common currency of computers.
1 Steve Jobs was a different kind of simplifier from our previous examples. He was a proposition-simplifier who aimed to make an “insanely great” product. Do you find it easier to imagine yourself as a price- or a proposition-simplifier? What about your company?
2 Price-simplifiers create or enlarge a mass market. With the Mac, Apple served the middle and upper echelons of users, who were willing to pay a significant premium for a more intuitive, useful, and beautiful product. Do you think this might work in your industry?
3 In the same broad market, price- and proposition-simplifiers can happily coexist, each with their distinctive customer appeal, and each with their distinctive commercial advantage. For price-simplifiers, it is a mass market. For most proposition-simplifiers, it is higher net margins. Which of these advantages do you think your organization would value more?
4 The worst fate, as with IBM, is to fall between the two simplifying stools — to be out-proposition-simplified and out-price-simplified. No matter how iconic the brand, how lofty the reputation, how high the installed base of users, how clever the executives, or even how rich the company, for those stuck in the middle, the knacker’s yard beckons. Is this a danger for your firm?
