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Not being someone who should be left behind the wheel of a fine automobile ever (I’ve been pulled over on nearly every civilised continent on earth for ‘unusual’ driving), there’s an interesting comment from the former CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking. What it boils down to was is if he listened to exactly what Porsche customers said they wanted and he built to that feedback, he’d be selling a badly knocked off BMW and that isn’t who his company is. So he felt he was better listening but only doing the things which fit to a vision the company developed without consultation. It’s not that customers are wrong, they’re all right in some way at they’re looking to address an issue which affects them, be that a problem of extra leg room or getting a handle on a heterogeneous computing environment, but the problem with following customer feedback directly is that there’s a slow incremental creep towards mediocrity until eventually you end up with a bland, grey, gelatinous uninspiring product which could be a poor echo of someone else's stuff. I talk to a lot of people every day of ever week I’m working. (I need to take some holiday time, but the concept of going to the airport to fly somewhere strikes me as being too much like work) People who develop, market, sell, support, use and live with products but I’m finding more and more I have to keep Wiedeking’s comments in mind. If we can’t come up with things ourselves that people didn’t know they needed before we showed it to them, we’re just selling the same uninspiring product as anybody else. |
