So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion - even if it is the landing page approach.

I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?

In addition, they made a lot of changes post launch due to market acceptance, e.g. size of storage, cost etc. The Mac benefited from the fact that Apple was willing to stick with it even though the Apple II was still the cash cow and the Mac struggled.

So it's bull in the sense that they were quite attuned to what the market had to say.

But it's not bull in the sense that they really did go their own way, almost fatally (e.g. no floppy -- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_D...).

Apple pays very close attention to market data, and it obviously informs their product development (see the big iPhones now, for example). What they tend not to do is market research: surveys, polls, focus groups, etc.

How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac? Okay, it may help indicate there is an opportunity, but this is the easy part, anyone can do that. It does nothing to indicate how to fulfill that opportunity, it's not the client's job to give a blueprint, and that's the hard part.

Imagine starting a restaurant business by asking people on the street what they like or what they think you should have on the menu... let's just say it's not going to star on Michelin.

> I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?

There's a quote often attributed to Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

I can think of plenty of prior successes that I doubt having started with a survey.

I guess you could get a bunch of different people to come in and try to use it, and do different stuff? See how they react to it, survey them afterwards?

edit: One place where Market Research does have value in the "soul" model is for refining the product to fit the market better. The germ of the idea is still intensely personal to the founder.

Do you mean this? I can see you might or might not. To satisfice would mean stopping at the first minimally acceptable solution to save time and effort. To invoke art and once-in-a-life-time product seems to suggest you want the opposite concept - optimising i.e. to strive relentlessly towards the maximal solution despite the extra time and effort it takes.

That's exactly how we got most of the Beatles' songs. The Beatles' function in the music industry was to repeat and popularize the ideas of other artists and to follow nascent trends, the same as any pop artist.

That's all anyone asks of Market Research.

The gist is that it's not about how "well you do" money wise, but how well you do in producing what you think is good.

It's not advice for those who would prefer something subpar that would make them more money to something good that might not do as well. etc).

And anyway, that's beside the point. They didn't go to that approach to make more money, but because they felt they had to go to that approach.

If you are inside the PC revolution and you have a chance to define where it is going, then who knows better than you?

Also, it would be unfortunate if the takeaway was "market research has no value". Indeed, later in the interview, when discussing "Why the mouse?" he says:

'We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.'

Clearly, in this case, they didn't trust that they could create "the best thing we could build".