January 9, 2007, Apple broke every rule…
I distinctly remember where I was and what I was doing on January 9, 2007. If you didn’t know, this farm boy spent around 25 years in the cellular industry. I was huddled in a cubicle in Kitchener, Ontario, watching Apple’s latest product announcements. I was convinced they were going to announce a cellular phone. Much like agriculture, there are only two degrees of separation in that industry, and I knew some RF guys working for a company in Northern California.
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and I got the greatest business lesson no MBA has ever taught. You see, I started my career at the once-formidable Motorola. At the time, it was, by our estimate, the greatest company the world has ever seen. We owned the cellular industry – we invented it – every cell phone manufacturer paid us royalties. We had the most experienced radio engineers the world has ever seen – we created the most dependable products there ever was. We knew customers better than anyone else. We were the definition of quality. We actually won the national Malcolm Baldrige Quality award given by Ronald Reagan in 1988!
When I saw Steve Jobs’ iPhone, I didn’t know how to say it other than, “Everything I was told to believe was a lie.” Apple broke every rule Motorola had.
For starters, Apple created a cellular phone without a removable battery. You would have been fired at Motorola at merely the thought of attempting to productize a phone without a removable battery. Accessories like batteries were a significant revenue for Motorola. Why on earth would you cannibalize that revenue? Never mind that standby time had increased dramatically over the years and practically nobody was swapping batteries anymore.
The iPhone’s entire front was dominated by a glass touchscreen! Before any product was released at Motorola, it had to pass the self-created “4-foot drop test”. Take a phone and drop it on all 6 sides from a 4-foot table onto bare concrete. After that test, there cannot be any significant damage and the phone had to make a call. There was no way that iPhone would ever pass that test.
The thing I realized on that date was this: Despite 125,000 employees at Motorola, not one of us had the audacity to ask, “In lieu of quality, what could the user get?” Oh yeah, why Kitchener, Ontario? I was working with Blackberry. You could see the fear in their eyes on that date.
I spent years believing that the best product was the one that followed all the rules. The most reliable. The most durable. The most thoroughly tested. And then I watched a company with virtually no history in cellular phones introduce a product that violated nearly everything we’d been taught was sacred. The amazing thing wasn’t that Apple broke our rules. It was that our customers really didn’t give a damn about them. They were lining up to buy a phone we would never have built.
Twenty years later, I find myself in another industry with some pretty deeply entrenched beliefs about how things should be done. This time, we’re not interested in following the rules. We’re interested in finding out which ones never needed to exist in the first place.
Raise the black flag, my friends.
-Craig