The payoff of a customer-centric approach to software and digital product design is substantial and long-lasting for both companies and their customers.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Received wisdom is that if you spend time up front getting the design right, you avoid costs later. But the longer you spend getting the design right, the more your upfront costs are, and the longer it takes for the software to start earning.
We are driven by providing technology to enterprise customers.
There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.
From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
Design is how you make your first impression with your consumers. Make sure it is a lasting one.
It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.
When you build a product, you make a lot of assumptions about the state of the art of technology, the best business practices, and potential customer usage/behavior.
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.
A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.