Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Should Edison have listened to customers?

Since Steve Jobs' retirement announcement, there has been lots of talk of Apple's mantra that they must lead the customer ("You can't just ask customers what they want and give it to them.").

But here's a story about where listening to customer input would have made a real difference to another innovator, Thomas Edison. Edison's original vision for the phonograph was as a tool to record office dictation. After the device's commercial introduction, users had a different idea. This story is from "The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World" by Randall Stross.

Everyone who tried out the phonograph - everyone but Edison, that is - was struck by its beautiful reproduction of music, which it handled far better than the sound of the human voice. [An] article in the Atlantic Monthly that had pointed out the machine's shortcomings as a device for office stenography also heaped praise on its ability to magnify musical sounds without distortion. Although there were very few recorded songs available for sale, the reports from the field showed avid interest among consumers. At the first convention of phonograph dealers in 1890, one distributor reported that one customer was "a crank on the subject," spending as much as $100 a week for musical cylinders (about $2,000 in current dollars).

[Edison associate Alfred] Tate and other Edison associates did their best to persuade Edison of the commercial potential of a phonograph marketed for entertainment purposes, but Edison was so attached to his original notion that the phonograph was best suited to office dictation that he could not let go of it....

Tate speculated in his memoirs afterward that Edison was reluctant to accept the phonograph as a machine for playing music because he did not want his phonograph associated with wind-up music boxes. Edison was dedicated to bringing out "useful" inventions, a mission that would be sullied by its association with something as frivolous as Victorian "toys" marketed to adults.


Edison's phonograph was eventually eclipsed by the Victrola, of course, and the man who invented this amazing technology never made a fortune from it. So this is a lesson in innovation: per Steve Jobs, don't ask customers what they want, but after you let them have a product, watch very carefully what they do with it.

[Photograph via Wikipedia]

No comments:

Post a Comment