Remember the iPod?

The power of doing things 10x better than the last guy

Sometimes people don’t know what they really want because they can’t imagine what is possible.

Very few people understood this better than Steve Jobs. From the original Apple computer to the Macintosh, the iPhone, and even the iPad that he introduced just two years before his death, Jobs rolled out one product after another that seemed ahead of its time.

Recently, we passsed the anniversary of one of those moments: the date in 2001 that Jobs introduced the iPod.

This was the first Apple portable music player that could hold about 60 times more music than the popular Flash MP3 players of the day and beat everything else by a mile on size, battery life, and ease of use.

It’s fun to go back and watch the video of this unveiling now; compared with when Jobs introduced the iPhone six years later, it’s like checking out your favorite band’s early performances, before you knew them.

Here's the video, by the way:

But, I don’t know that I would have realized its significance, except that I saw Guy Kawasaki speak at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Palm Desert, California, a few weeks back.

Here’s how this comes together. Kawasaki, who was Apple’s chief evangelist in the 1980s, said he learned three key things from working for Jobs:

• First, design matters. Maybe not everybody cares about design, but enough people do that it matters when launching products.

• Second, choose whom you work with based only on whether they can do the job. That might sound obvious today, but Kawasaki said that Jobs embodied it; as one example, half of his direct reports back in the 1980s were women, in an industry that was miles away from gender parity.

• Third—and this is key—it’s important to try to make 10X jumps, not just 10 percent improvements.

Here’s how Kawasaki put it:

If you want to make a difference in the world, you don’t do things 10 or 15 percent better.

You do things 10 times better. The Macintosh was not 10 percent better than the Apple II or the IBM PC. The iPhone, iPod, [and] iPad [were] not 10 percent better than the Walkman and the flip phones from Motorola.

You have to jump to the next curve.

Drilling down further, I think Jobs realized two key things about trying to make these kinds of giant leaps.

The first is that customers are more likely to be wowed and excited and fall in love with a product if you can show that it’s exponentially better than anything else that came before.

The second is perhaps even more important: If you want to recruit the most talented, dedicated people and really motivate them to give their all to something, give them something to shoot for that will seem like it’s worth their effort.

Now, go back to the iPod. I know it seems a bit anachronistic now, and that the iPhone or Android device on which you’re likely reading this can potentially store 200 times as much data, with tons more functionality and advanced design.

But, keep in mind this was almost a quarter of a century ago.

Maybe the best way to mark its place in history is to go to its tech obituary, from 2022, when Apple finally stopped producing it after 21 years:

Within a few years, [the iPod] would change consumer electronics and the music industry and lead to Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.

First arriving in October 2001, the pocket-size rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces. It came packaged with white earbuds in a custom color, moon gray, and held 1,000 songs.

It exploded in popularity in the years that followed, creating what became known as the iPod generation. Throughout much of the 2000s, people wandered the world, headphones dangling from their ears. The iPod was ubiquitous.

Apple sold an estimated 450 million iPods across all generations of the product (including the wildly popular iPod Mini which was introduced in 2005, and its success led ultimately to the iPhone and the iPad.

Today, Apple’s market capitalization is more than $3.66 trillion under Tim Cook — roughly 714 times what the company was worth when Jobs took the stage in Palo Alto 23 years ago.

You don’t get that kind of growth by trying to improve things by 10 percent.

Steve Jobs knew it, Guy Kawasaki recognized it, and maybe you did, too.

But if you didn't, now you do!

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7 other things

• South Korean President Yoon announced martial law -- then abruptly reversed course after citizens protested, the largest unions called for a general strike, and the National Assembly voted to end it. Yoon had accused opponents of plotting “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.” It's the middle of the night in South Korea as I write this, so I assume more news will happen by the time you read this on Wednesday. (BBC)

• Yet another leak from the U.S. Supreme Court, this one showing the three justices (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch), who pushed hardest against any kind of binding ethics code. A compromise list of ethics suggestions last year has no enforcement mechanism, and no restrictions on taking gifts, accepting travel or on real estate deals. Justices are also allowed to use court staff for private book deals, for example one worth $3.7 million in the case of Justice Sotomayor. (NY Times, via the Daily Beast)

• For just the 12th time in history, NASA detected and tracked an asteroid before it hit Earth. The asteroid, designated COWECP5, was about 27 inches long and expected to burn up over Siberia. I guess if you're reading this, NASA was correct and it didn't cause any damage. Personally, I thought NASA tracked things like this all the time, but reports say it's rare, and we had only 7 hours notice before the asteroid reached our Big Blue Ball. (Daily Mail)

• As companies are getting better at backing up their data, some hackers who once might have focused on data breaches to extort ransom are now going for "total destruction" in order to force victim companies and organizations to pay. (Axios)

• Costco is basically getting rid of books for sale. They'll still have special holiday offers, but as of next month, they'll no longer stock them regularly. For younger readers, "books" were physical products made from trees on which people used to store and read written words. (Inc.)

• Swedish criminal gangs are recruiting children as young as age 11 to carry out contract killings, according to a report. Cold-hearted reason: those aged under 15 are too young to be prosecuted, a quirk of Swedish law that critics say is in urgent need of reform. (The Telegraph)

• In the Battle Against Porch Pirates, People Will Try Anything: Insurance against theft at your front porch is the latest way shoppers are fighting back. (WSJ)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!