Monthly Archives: January 2015

Thinness disease runs rampant at Apple

Like most iPhone announcements in recent years, much of Apple’s bravado at the iPhone 6 launch was centered around thinness. (Yes, thinness is actually a word. I  looked it up.) They proudly proclaimed the iPhone 6 to be the thinnest smart phone in the world!  Unfortunately, they made it so thin that they only had room enough for a 6-hour battery. Your mileage may vary, but my iPhone 6 dies daily at about 3 pm, and lots of my friends have the same problem.

The dumbth didn’t stop with making the iPhone 6 too thin. Team iPhone also made the surface of the phone so slippery that you simply must put it in a case or a condom to have any hope of not dropping it every other time you use it. Think about it: have you ever seen a naked (i.e. case-less) iPhone 6 in the wild without a cracked screen? I have not.

What consumer need or desire was Apple hoping to satisfy by making the iPhone 6 so thin and slippery?  Was the iPhone 5 too thick to fit in your pocket?  Was its surface so rough that people had trouble sliding it in and out of their pocket?  No, and no.  Did they want it to bend, like a leather wallet, to adopt the contour of your butt when it’s in your back pocket?  Probably not.

So then, why on earth is it so thin and so slick?  Here’s how I’m guessing this went down.  Apple probably used an all-male design team for the iPhone 6: a bunch of guys with a “size matters” mentality, who pursued thinness at all costs.  I’ll bet that if they had even one female member on the team she could have shed some light on how ridiculous Apple’s continuing form-over-function pursuit of thinness has become.  She could have pointed out how much better the new iPhone would be if they made room for a battery that can run the new energy-gulping iOS 8 all day long.  Even if she couldn’t make a dent in this deep-rooted thinness disease, maybe she would have convinced team iPhone to avoid the slipperiness problem by helping them realize that the uber-slick surface would make it mandatory for iPhone 6 users to add a cover, robbing the device of its coveted thinness.

These two huge gaffes could have been avoided had Apple asked 100 people (Apple insiders and outsiders) to use the iPhone 6 as their primary smart phone for a week or two prior to locking down the feature set. These two problems would have surfaced very quickly.  Maybe Apple’s penchant for secrecy ahead of a product launch prevented them from getting valuable/necessary feedback that would have enabled them to avoid such foolish mistakes.

Here’s a quick message to Tim or anyone at Apple who is willing listen to some constructive feedback from an Apple fan who is losing confidence in the post-Steve Apple.

About this blog

This is a blog about business mistakes: my own gaffes and other peoples’ more prominent snafus. My hope is that, by shining a bright light on these mistakes, I can help new entrepreneurs innovate more swiftly and less painfully than I did by offering them a chance to avoid making the same costly faux pas that others have already made.

Industry pundit Esther Dyson long ago voiced some sage and pithy advice in just four words: “Always make new mistakes.” (Esther graciously allowed me to use her quote as the title for my blog.  Many thanks, Esther!)

These four words contain two powerful messages. The first is to always make mistakes because they are the lifeblood of the trial and error process that is essential to innovation. I feel certain that the most innovative people are the most error-prone. An aspiring entrepreneur who is afraid to make mistakes will never reach his/her potential as an innovator.  I remember my trumpet teacher when I was a teenager told me “If you’re going to make a mistake, make sure everybody hears it,” another way of saying “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”  If your audience can’t hear your mistakes, they can’t hear your music either.

The second part of Esther’s message is to make new mistakes. Smart people learn from their mistakes, and they don’t make the same mistake twice. Really smart people also learn from the mistakes of others. This is not plagiarism. It’s a foolish waste of time and resources to make a mistake that someone else has already made, especially when it affects other people like your customers and employees. Eleanor Roosevelt said it well: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You cannot live long enough to make them all yourself.”

If you want to learn from the mistakes of others, you’ve come to the right place. I am especially well qualified to write about this topic because I have made so many mistakes over the past 40+ years. I am a serial entrepreneur, a veteran of 11 start-up ventures.  I founded three of the companies and was CEO of five of them. Two of these ventures, excite.com and Sun Microsystems had very successful IPO’s.  However, during this entrepreneurial journey, I also made well over $1 billion dollars worth of mistakes!  I’m likely nowhere near done making mistakes, which means that I am assured a never-ending source of material for this blog.

So, this is a blog about mistakes, many of which are real whoppers made by me and others that are skilled at making mistakes.  Some are blunders that affected millions of people and/or torched tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. Alongside my tale of each mistake, I will also try to offer up some ideas about how the mistake could have been avoided or more quickly mitigated.  Without that, it might sound like I am just whining.  I always hate it when someone bitches about how screwed up something is without offering an idea on how to fix it.

One more thing:  I’m a newbie blogger, so I’ll make blogging mistakes too.  I would love to hear any feedback you’re willing to share about my blog, and there’s no need to be gentle. I have developed a thick skin over the years living down all of these bloopers. Your feedback and coaching will help me to always make new mistakes.