“When I put the accompanying quotes side by side…”
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. – Steve Jobs
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates
“…my first thought was that Bill Gates’s greatest source of learning is Steve Jobs, and my second thought was that Bill Gates might have more frustrated, disheartened, or enraged customers than any executive in the history of the planet,” Dale Dauten writes for The Boston Globe.
“Indeed, searching out ‘the most unhappy’ Gates customers would be risky business, as I’ve seen people using Microsoft products who seem as though they would gladly take Bill Gates out to a field and take baseball bats to him, like the scene with the printer in the movie ‘Office Space,'” Dauten writes.
Dauten writes, “Here’s a question: Who would you rather be, Bill or Steve? Richest man in the world, or the guy who created the Apple computer, Pixar Studios, and iPod/iTunes? Here’s a more general question: Would you rather be the farmer or the explorer?”
Full article here.
Related article:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ ultimate goal: ‘to take back the computer business from Microsoft’ – June 16, 2005