In the presentation, when Jobs did the world’s first “swipe to unlock,” the audience made an audible gasp. A minute later, he brought up a list of artists in the phone’s “iPod” app and asked, “Well, how do I scroll through my list of artists? I just take my finger and scroll.” Another audible gasp. It’s weird that something so normal today was jaw-dropping 17 years ago.
This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet.
We know what quality means to us! We *feel* it. We know why high quality things cost more and we know how it influences our choices. In the physical world, it’s the difference between a $15.00 price tag and a $150 one.
i went mostly offline and then all this happened
Every founder tells themselves a story about why they’re heading to the gold rush, but the executive coach I would eventually hire says there are really only two. Do you want to be rich, generating wealth in service of some further end? Or do you want to be king, with money a mere byproduct of trying to make the world the way you feel it should be?
The business consultant William Bridges argued that every transition involves a period of loss, then a period in the neutral zone, and then a period of rebirth. The loss that comes with retirement can be brutal. Some highly successful people mourn the life that gave them meaning and made them the center of the room. People in the neutral zone don’t yet know who the new version of themselves will be. They report feeling hollow, disoriented, empty.
Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.
You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance. BANKKY or KLAQQED? Should you give IOCBYHZ a look or just pay extra for the Oxo?
The shopping mall is an experience.
Showing every SKU, of course, is exactly the Amazon approach - 'the everything store', and it works well for some categories, and especially when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want is not necessarily the starting point - that's what needs to happen along the funnel. Amazon's relative weakness at curation, discovery and recommendation (I've seen data suggesting the recommendation platform is only 1/4 of its books sales) is, I think, a big reason why, after 25 years of ruthless and relentless execution, it's still only got to 25% of the print books market in the UK and USA. A bookshop (or any shop) is, yes, the end-point to a logistics system, but a good bookshop is primarily a discovery platform. That is, it's more about the tables than the shelves. And the tables are lists, not inventory.