Listening to your customers

Conventional wisdom is that a business should listen to its customers and deliver products or services than meet the needs of the customers. It sounds good.

Many companies follow this wisdom. Microsoft has done so. One of the biggest messages that customers tell Microsoft is that they want their existing systems to keep working. They want their e-mail and document systems (Outlook and Word) to keep working. They want their databases to keep working. They want their custom-built software to keep working. And Microsoft complies, going to great lengths to keep new versions of operating systems and applications compatible with previous versions.

Apple, in contrast, does not keep their systems compatible. Apple constantly revises the design of their hardware and software, breaking backwards compatibility. The latest Macbooks use a single connector (a USB type C connector) and drop all of the older connectors (network, power, USB type A, Thunderbolt, etc.). Apple has revised software to drop old features. (Mac OS X "Lion" removed support for 32-bit processors.) Is Apple not listening to its customers?

I believe Apple *is* listening. Apple gets a different message from customers: They want their systems to "just work" and they want their systems to be "cool". Those elements mean that the system design must change (especially to be "cool"). Apple offers new, cool systems; Microsoft offers stability.