The Uber Pressure of Uber Excellence
Apple has changed the way tech companies are recently shaping their value propositions. It is no longer acceptable to have a great product that addresses a pain. We now need to solve that problem in a fantastic way. We need to look at the overall end user experience and context and fit our product seamlessly into that experience. We must deliver innovation constantly, release upon release, without compromising that seamlessly user experience. This is what I call the pursuit of Uber Experience.
Uber Experience, which used to be a differentiator offered by very few, it’s fast becoming what most are searching for. Silicon Valley startups’ executives constantly slide into words like “experience” and “beauty” when pitching VCs. There is even evidence that if you relentlessly pursue excellence in quality, design and user experience, with absolute and total commitment to the final user experience, you will eventually build a brand people implicitly trust.
Will Uber Experience ever become the common practice across multiple industries? I don’t know. Uber Experience brings along a collection of “Ubers” that stretch the day-to-day operation of any company.
First of all, it forces leaders to trade off short-term economic gain (revenue, profits) for long-term sustainable market share by pushing them into making many all-or-nothing decisions that are far from obvious. It means they must say no to short-term opportunities that will defocus resources from the far away end goal. It also means slashing products and services that are good but not great. You cannot do something Uber well if you do a lot of things simultaneously. You must shorten the list of things you want to be great at and bet on them. But you have to make sure they’re the right ones for there’s no safety net to rely on if your bet is wrong.
Secondly, Uber Experience sometimes forces companies to be initially perceived as crazy. When you fire the whole Engineering team because they’ve compromised product aesthetics by leaving a screw visible, you will be considered either an extraordinary visionary or, more likely, a crazy tyrant. The difference between the two is only clear after repeated evidence of success or failure. But success brought by Uber Experience is not immediate and if results take too long to materialize you will be perceived as a failure.
Apple is today at the apex of reaping economic benefits from years of uncompromising pursuit of Uber Quality, Uber Design, Uber Engineering all coming together in a Uber focus on the Consumer and the overall Uber Experience. It required a somewhat not-very-nice, egomaniac individual leading a capable company to pull it off. Jobs joined Apple, the second time, at a perfect time. The company was doing badly because of past poor decisions but the basic quality ingredients for Uber Experience were still there. Jobs bought enough time from investors by immediately correcting some obvious mistakes and be allowed to foster the implementation (or reinforcement) of the Uber Experience ethos in everything done by Apple.
That guy is now gone. And while there is inertia to his principles and a desire to do things the same way the fact is that Tim Cook feels things differently. He honestly believes in his head that Jobs’s approach works but I doubt that he shares in his heart Jobs’s paranoid pursuit of Uber Aesthetics and Uber Experience.
IOS 6 Apple Maps is a case in point. While I doubt that Jobs would have humbly succumbed to Google demands to control the UI of the Maps app, I think he would at least not raise the expectations announcing that Apple Maps would be “amazing” like Phil Schiller touted at Apple iPhone 5 launch keynote. I know I wouldn’t. Apple Maps is a badly engineered app clearly done by people that had no clue on the complexity of the problem they were tackling. Like the typical critical new feature/product of Apple it should have stayed in stealth Beta for a much longer time. Deciding to release it too soon broke the Uber Excellence contract that Apple has virtually signed with its wide fan club.
Keeping up with 100% Uber Excellence is impossible. There will always be missteps. Jobs made several even during his Second Coming. MobileMe was one of them. In a way, iCloud also was. But the big difference from what happened with Apple Maps is that the former products were somehow accessory and expectations were brought down before the launch. I suspect that although Jobs must have been tremendously annoyed with these missteps at the time, he must also have realized that while they were not “in accord” with his beloved Uber Experience, he couldn’t do anything about them except pretending they were unimportant.
Apple has shown that delivering Uber Experience is possible and if done long enough eventually offers unmatched competitiveness. Its example is already putting pressure on entrepreneurs, executives and VCs because it shows that it largely depends on selecting the right person with the right mindset at the helm of companies. The mindset to really understand their customers and envision how life will be with the introduction of their products on their lives. The mindset to have a long term vision and stay around for the long run. The mindset to shun away short-term economic reward in exchange for the honor of building something lasting that everyone loves.
I believe the disruption that Jobs and Apple have provoked on the music, telecom and computer industries is not the real lasting one. The lasting disruption is the realization, by companies from all industries, that anything less than continued and consistent Excellence at all levels of the user experience will eventually fall prey to competitors who manage to deliver it.
