Product Evolution Quotes

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

I think people are going to like my new shoes. I like them. I had a lot of success with the one last year, but this year's shoe is going to be a little different, but at the same time it's going to be a little spin-off on last year's shoe.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

Look at how many times we've improved on the Game Boy Advance in terms of the look, the feel, screen changes, and everything else. We believe that type of constant innovation is critical to driving this industry, and certainly if you look at the world wide sales of Game Boy Advance, I don't think anyone would disagree.

Don't protect your past. Don't protect your products.

That's why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that's one of Apple's challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we'll do better, because we're completely aware of it and we make it a priority.

The issue is not to ask your customers what they want today, but to try to imagine what the customer is going to want in a world where, for instance, their cellphone is in their glasses.

What was really tough for me was that Lars Magnus Ericsson founded Ericsson in 1876; we've always had a consumer product. And I'm the 16th CEO of Ericsson, and I decided that we don't have any consumer products anymore.

Twitter didn't make up the hashtag. Twitter didn't make up the retweet. It's our users. And people started using them so much that we decided to weave them into the product. I can't think of another company that has taken its users' actions and said, 'We're going to make them useful to everybody.'

Once your product is working, switch from not caring about this to caring about this a little bit.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

If I learned one thing working at Facebook: If users are trying to use your app in a certain way, get out of their way and let them.

The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.

One of the things I've probably absorbed when I was in business school - and didn't know I was learning it - was about life cycles, that things begin, and they peak, and then they decline. So whether you look at life cycles of fashion, or you look at life cycles of things that people buy, designs, everything is in a life cycle. Getting out of the apparel businesses and into beauty and lingerie, those were very big bets, but they were very deliberately thought about and tested over time.

At a certain point, the services that you build around the hardware become more important than the hardware itself.

Form follows failure.

I don't know that I can give a definitive answer to that, I can only say that if we create the right climate those who are producing those products will have the opportunity to move into a higher value product if changes are needed if we get this right.

We're not trying to be Nike. It's about evolving into new products that are going to make people's lives better.

The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.

The most popular product 20 years from now, that everyone uses, has not been invented yet. That means that you're not late.

If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.

We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.

If we had not had the Wii U, we would not have the Switch.

For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product.

I think that building any product that has a lot of user loyalty is a bit like making a sequel to a great movie or video game - people generally want 'more of the same thing, except better and different.'