Years ago a PR guy associated with the original Star Trek TV series wrote about one of producer Gene Roddenberry’s key concepts: In an action show, a character pulls a gun and shoots someone. In sci-fi, however, typically the character spends time explaining the physics of the weapon, then shoots someone. Star Trek, Roddenberry decreed, would not interrupt action sequences with technobabble. Captain Kirk would just shoot the phaser.
Which is pretty much the genius of Steve Jobs.
When you are writing a letter or a memo, your objective is to write, not to experiment with advanced technology. What you want from your computer or software is for it to make it as easy as possible to get your writing done.
A famous ad for the early version of Apple’s iMac had the punchline: “there is no step three.” Steps one and two being to plug it in and hook up the modem to a phone line. This was a cheat, by the way, you also have to plug in the keyboard and mouse. But the point was still that the iMac was designed to let a user get up and running in the fewest amount of steps.
Yes, there is a lot of hype and glitz associated with Apple products. For years I steered clear of them believe them to be overpriced, overrated, and oversold by its legion of cult-like fans.
Then I got a Mac to test for a review, and it turned out it was easier to use.
That principle -- the user wants to shoot the gun, not have to figure out how to shoot it -- shaped Apple’s product lineup: Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, iEverything.
The iPod illustrates the point. The iPod is elegantly simple on many levels. At a time when users were transitioning from physical media for music, the iPod and companion iTunes software made the process of getting a song into your hands to play fast and simple. It made the task of managing and accessing a large music library fast and simple. It made the transaction of buying digital music fast and simple -- and reasonably priced. As a business proposition, it turned Apple from a computer company to a media company and pretty much set the company on the road to challenging Exxon-Mobil as the corporation with the largest market capitalization on earth.
Not everything Jobs touched has turned to gold. In the current product lineup, for example, the Apple TV is a product that has yet to find its market niche. The iWork productivity suite (Keynote presentation, Pages word processing, Numbers spreadsheets) have yet to evolve into products that are as easy to use as they should be. Apple has had a fair share of flops. But as Hiawatha Bray In The Boston Globe and Nick Schulz in the National Review both wrote, Jobs has an extraordinary ability to learn from failure and rebound.
