Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Wozniak spoke on an Indian television program Sunday, and offered some very interesting opinions and points of view on a number of Apple’s less successful releases over the years.
In the interview, reports MacWorld, Woz stated that smartphones competing with the iPhone competing smartphones were “failures,” just like the Apple III and the Lisa.
The Apple III was a failure, the LISA was a failure, and the Macintosh was a failure. It was only by modifying the Macintosh hugely and over time that we made it a good computer…
If the guys at Apple had built the machine that they would love, it would have been successful. It came instead from formulas from Apple executives…
Marketing people were in charge and some very bad decisions got made, in my opinion. There were hardware failures. You put out a product that has failures right away, and even if you fix it a year later, it just doesn’t sell. It’s the same thing with any smartphone today. It comes out and it has something horribly wrong about it. You can fix everything wrong about it, and it still won’t sell. It has missed its window of opportunity.
It’s an interesting statement – most devices competing with the iPhone tend to be tailored to specific audiences, compared with the iPhone (and most of Apple’s successful products), which try to present the best possible device for all users, rather than fragmenting in favor of specific features.
The idea that simply building a product that you yourself would love, rather than resorting to formulas and catering to specific user groups, will result in the best products is a fascinating one, and an idea that I agree with Steve Wozniak on.
