Monday, March 12, 2012

Phelps and Jobs on the customer

“The point to keep in mind is that how much it costs to produce anything means little or nothing unless you know what people will pay for it now and in the future. In business, it is bad luck to tell people what they should want instead of trying to give them what they do want. That is what we mean when we say the customer is king. There has never been a successful revolution against him.”

-Thomas William Phelps, 100 to 1 in the stock market

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Excerpt from Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”