GET A GRIP!!!

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” - William A. Foster

Quality is the very concept of putting your best foot forward. It is the concept that allows an organization to provide products and services that will ensure customers continue to hand over their hard earned money for more. More than innovation, it is the very concept that ensures a customer gets what they are expecting to get.

Where many innovation pundits break with those coming from the school of quality is that they place innovation first and quality second as the key to success. Although innovation essentially provides organizations a ‘first-strike’ capability, quality is what ensures that advantage is leveraged. That is why so many companies in today’s market are able to survive without too much innovation. They merely copy (with slight modifications) the products and services of the innovators… and do it with exceptional quality.

Apple, for the most part of its history, has put quality first and innovation second. They didn’t invent the Personal Computer, but they sure made the experience more fun, interactive, and RELIABLE. Apple took innovative products, and through the wizardry of Steve Jobs and his leadership skills, added features oddly left out in their competitor’s products and made their products truly practical and enjoyable to use. In fact, they pretty much took a page out of the Japanese playbook, which for many years copied western technologies, and made them perfect and reliable.

Toyota, Sony and Honda, (just to name a few) first put focus on the culture of quality before that of innovation, and to this date that culture still perseveres in their organizations. How do I know… well, Toyota’s reaction to last year’s “accelerator-gate” was one of humility, acceptance, and overall cooperation… Not one of defiance.

Apple’s recent antenna-gate has the potential to bring down this powerful company. Apple has perfected pretty much every relevant consumer electronic item invented in the last quarter century.

- The MAC left PCs in the dust: It’s mouse and GUI, not market firsts, but greatly improved and combined into a neat package, and the GUI based software finally made home computers a must have. Their strict control of who could develop software allowed them to ensure a quality system that was not prone to crash… unlike PCs.

- The iPod left all other MP3 players (Rio, Sony, etc.) in the dust: There was nothing new about and MP3 player, however their innovative user controls and menu features made the gadgets fun and simple to use. iTunes made things better by providing users access to millions of songs at $1… and it’s copyright technology ensured record labels would join the service. The iPod was reliable, and the MP3 to have.

- The iPhone broke the business-like feel of the original Palm smartphones and delivered a gadget that could seemingly do everything. A great user interface, a media player, and a software architecture that would allow thousands of programmers to develop APPS marked a shift in the smartphone market that still has competitors chasing them… until now.

“…Just avoid holding it that way” – Steve Jobs

Apple forgot what the smartphone is about at the core. It’s not a computer, it’s not an MP3 player, it’s not a camera, and it’s not a video player… It’s a phone! Customers buy iPhones because they need a phone first, and the features second. That is why it was amazing to hear Mr. Jobs, such a long time pundit of QUALITY to put the blame back on the consumer. Imagine if Toyota, rather than humbly accepting that it had failed the consumer would have stated… “Just avoid driving it that way!”

Furthermore, the reason for the fiasco Mr. Jobs later conveyed didn’t help. By stating that the iPhone4’s signal strength algorithm, a simple piece of software which has been globally perfected over the past quarter century, was flawed, made many people think that Apple was in ‘cahoots’ with AT&T and its “More Bars is Better…” campaign. In other words Apple was trying to help its dedicated carrier look better by fooling its users into believing they ‘always’ have great reception on the network commonly known for poor reception (otherwise why would ATT be spending so much effort on the “More Bars” campaign?). The ultimate goal, of course, was Steve Jobs strategy to use word of mouth from the millions of iPhone4 users to bring customers back to AT&T thus getting rid of their Droids and Storms.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.” – Steve Jobs

So it is hard to understand why the man who made the above statement would go on the defensive to the degree that he made iPhone4 users feel ‘stupid’, (an area previously reserved for Microsoft and its Windows OS), rather than making a contrite admission of the iPhone4’s flaws. Instead of telling customers to “Get a Grip!” he should have told customers that Apple will provide the grips… not 3 weeks after the fact. But then again, it could make sense from the man that made the following quote…

“Why join the navy if you can be a Pirate?” – Steve Jobs