Doing it Right

I am not staying at a particularly nice hotel in Japan, yet I am impressed with the features in my room. There are a bunch of tiny details that really make my stay comfortable. I don't think the Japanese woke up one day and said, "We are going to make the ultimate hotel room." Instead I imagine it was an iterative process where they asked themselves, "How do we make our hotel more comfortable than our competitors?" That is how Apple has had their success as well as Microsoft.

Nobody remembers versions 1 and 2 of Microsoft Windows. I do because I had one of the original copies of Windows 2. It was a horrible product that was a cross between DOS and the original Macintosh. Rather than having pretty icons, you had a listing of file names that you could click to access. Nobody bought it and so Microsoft realized they had to make it better. Then came Windows 3.0 and we saw that Microsoft learned their lesson. It would be nice if they continued to make things better instead of simply changing things.

Apple is similar. They released their first iPod and then continued to refine it as other competitors entered the market place. When Microsoft introduced their attempt at an MP3 player, Apple was already ahead of them and continued to distance themselves with a better product. When solid-state storage became affordable, Apple continued to offer the larger capacity disk-based iPods, but also introduced a line of smaller and sleeker ones as well.

Successful technology companies will always ask that important question, "How do we make our product more appealing than our customers?" and not simply, "How do we make money?" Now if I could just figure out how to get a heated toilet seat in my bathroom at home.