Young Maxwell

In 1997, a developer publicly humiliated Steve Jobs in front of a packed room. Jobs had just returned to Apple after 11 years away. Instead of fighting back, he admitted the guy was partly right — then explained the principle he believed could turn Apple into an $8–10 billion-a-year business. And his answer had almost nothing to do with technology. Most companies, Jobs explained, work backwards. They build something technically impressive, fall in love with what they created, and only then ask how they are going to sell it. He had made that mistake himself so many times that he said he had the “scar tissue” to prove it. His rule was the opposite: start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. Jobs used the LaserWriter as an example. Inside the printer were a Canon laser engine, an Apple-designed controller, Adobe PostScript and AppleTalk. It was an extraordinary piece of engineering, but none of that was the reason he believed people would buy it. When the first page came out, Jobs looked at it and realized they didn't need to explain what was inside the machine. They could simply hold up the result and ask one question: Do you want this? That was the entire point. Customers don't pay you for how difficult your product was to build. They pay for what it does for them. A developer tried to expose what Steve Jobs didn't know about technology. Jobs responded by explaining something far more valuable about business.