14 DAY TRIAL // Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod, iPhone, and iOS product marketing, shared four key elements of Apple's continued success at a recent event where he revealed to the audience that Apple doesn't enter any market until it knows it can beat everyone to the first place.
Greg Joswiak is the key person at Apple who manages promotion for the iPhone and iPod. He also plays a active role in their development, and works with the company's engineering teams to design the next generation of devices.
He even touches base with the technicians on features and price. So it’s not surprising he took it upon himself to dress up in a blazing shirt and take the stage at Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge to share with the audience four key lessons he learned in 20 years of working with what is now the most valuable tech company on the planet.
Via the WSJ’s TechEurope blog, excerpts from Joswiak’s transcribed speech can be found below.
Focus—”It means saying no, not saying yes. We do very few things at Apple. We are $100bn in revenue with very few products. There are only so many grade A players. If you spread yourself out over too many things, none of them will be great.”
Simplicity—”Make complex things simple. A lot of people think it means take something simple and leave it at its core essence. But it isn’t that. When you start to build something, it quickly becomes really complex. But that is when a lot of people stop. If you really know your product and the problems, then you can take something that is complex and then make it simple.”
Courage—”Courage drives a lot of decisions in business. Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you. You don’t build a product just because everyone else has one. ”
Best—”If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it. You need that differentiation. At Apple if we can’t be the best then we are not interested in it.”