If you ask your users what they want and what they don’t want and develop there after, you won’t be innovating but only producing what everyone else is already doing.
The below quote comes from an article comparing Apples MacBook Air with other ultra thin laptop manufacturers and it’s a great read on just that topic.
From the PC World article Windows laptop makers can’t catch up to the MacBook AirYou have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don’t know they want it yet, and then you have to invest in it and stick with it until you get it right.
It goes for product design, which is the focus of the above article, and for design and innovation in general. In the early days of film making George Méliès, a French film maker who led many of the developments in cinematic film and special effects, approached the Lumière brothers who in 1892 had begun making moving pictures. After having seen a demonstration he wanted to buy one of their cameras, but the brothers responded that it had little commercial value and turned him down. Méliès, who still wanted a camera, went to England where he managed to find a willing seller. Whilst back in France, filming traffic on a road in Paris, the gate mechanic in his camera got jammed. He stopped filming to fix the jam and meanwhile the traffic continue to flow. Once the problem was corrected he continued filming from the same spot, something that ended up giving the finished film an unexpected touch.
When combing the frame before the jam with the one after it looked like a car, that had appeared in the frame before the jam, simply disappeared as by magic. In reality all that has happened was that it had moved out of the frame whilst he’d been fixing the jam, but that moment was the birth of the Stop trick, an effect Méliès would use a lot to do magic tricks. When he died in 1938 he had directed 531 films. The Lumière brothers who had stated that…
the cinema is an invention without a future
…had a short-lived career in film and moved on to focus on colour photography.
As with the article referenced above the point of this story is that it takes dedication, a strong belief and hard work to come up with new products or ways of doing things. There will be many naysayers along the way but if it wasn’t for people like Méliès and companies like Apple who insisted and kept with what they believe in, we’d be stuck in yesterday.
