Understanding “Quality.”
Blackberry and Kodak, in their time, ruled their world with a dominant market share. They were defacto monopolies. Where are they now? Did they accurately identify who their customers are? Did they need to understand what the users of their products want?
Blackberry (Research In Motion) focused on product features and functions with a proprietary closed operating system. Blackberry thought it knew what its users wanted from a phone and was confident that its in-house developers would develop the needed apps.
Android and Apple built platforms for developers-entrepreneurs and consumers. iPhone and Android harnessed massive communities of software producers to create more and higher-quality apps on their platforms. Apple Store and Play Store didn’t even try to guess the needed apps. They let the users decide.
Blackberry never understood that its core customers were independent software developers building apps of all types in large numbers.
Kodak defined quality as a better-fidelity film. The company poured millions into delivering on its promise. However, what people wanted was the ability to take and share billions of photos for free or at a minuscule cost.
The ‘quality’ that most of the customer base wanted was cheap and easy, not necessarily professional quality.
In the 1990s, Microsoft, AOL, and several other email providers competed for the market share. They all charged a monthly fee for slightly different features and functionality. 1996 Sabeer Bhatia introduced a barebone email called “Hotmail,” free. Its subscriber base grew exponentially, and Microsoft bought it two years later.
The users wanted the killer application, the Email, free.
These confusions happen all the time. Quality doesn’t mean ‘specialness’ or ‘perfection.’ It means knowing who the customers are and what they want.
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