June 25, 2003
Steve Jobs on the Ginger
An interesting article that I never saw, from harvard law.
HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger"
But Jobs was still shaking his head at Bezos's suggestion. Because of the Internet, he said, slow was no longer possible. People would learn about Ginger in a flash of bits and bytes, and would want one now. So a small launch in a foreign place was foolish, because if the machine was unavailable in the United States, the company would blow its chance for $100 million of free publicity in its biggest market. Plus, Singapore was a nest of pirates, and the company would end up spending a fortune fighting them. If the company wanted a slow, controlled launch, better to start on a handful of U.S. college campuses.
"If you show this to Hennessy," Jobs said to Doerr, referring to John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University and a world-class engineer, "he'll shit in his pants." Evidently Hennessy did that more readily than Jobs did. "And if you offer to give him a hundred of them if he'll run a safety study and a usage study, that's a done deal in ten minutes," continued Jobs. "You do that at ten colleges and maybe at Disney, so people can see them but not buy them."
But he warned that even this sort of slow launch was filled with dangers. If one stupid kid at Stanford hurt himself using was filled with dangers. If one stupid kid at Stanford hurt himself using a Ginger and then announced online that the machine sucked, the company was sunk, because there was no way to control that or counter it if people couldn't ride one for themselves. With a big fast launch, on the other hand, a few malcontents wouldn't be heard above the general hoopla. "I understand the appeal of a slow burn," he concluded, "but personally I'm a big-bang guy." For the first time that day he smiled. "The risk with a fast burn," he continued, "is that it exposes you to your enemies. You're going to need a lot of money to fight thieves."
"We have a few things they can't get," said Dean. "Specialty components with only one source."
"They'll figure out a way around that," said Jobs.
"I've spent nine years looking," said Dean, "and I don't think so."
"I think the emphasis of this conversation is wrong," said Bezos. "You have a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?"
Jobs said he lived seven minutes from a grocery and wasn't sure he would use Ginger to get there.
Comments
That was an awesome article to read- a great window into the way people like Jobs work in situations like that.
I thought this was an interesting:
But he warned that even this sort of slow launch was filled with dangers. If one stupid kid at Stanford hurt himself using a Ginger and then announced online that the machine sucked, the company was sunk, because there was no way to control that or counter it if people couldn't ride one for themselves.
Makes you wonder what they thought about the footage of Bush falling off it. I guess there is no suchthing as bad publicity at this stage of the game.
Posted by: Lee | June 26, 2003 12:00 PM