Una lettera aperta di critica dell’autore del blog di Elegant Solutions a “Mr. Apple” Steve Jobs riguardo al lancio del iPhone… Beh anche in Italia non è che sia andata molto meglio, cosa ne dite?
Dear Mr. Jobs,
As a longtime customer somewhat knowledgeable in business operations, I’d like to humbly suggest you consider a strategy of “Think Lean” instead of just “Think Different.” I’m bringing this up because your recent launch of the new iPhone 3G leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps you’re patting yourself on the back that so many people want one. But you might consider kicking yourself in the ass for not allowing them to get one, and at that get one without significant glitches.
Thinking Lean is all about creating compelling value and flowing it as close to burden-free as possible to the customer. You need to keep this in mind if you want customer love and loyalty. Unfortunately, your launch strategy was the epitome of the opposite of lean. And I now have a healthy dose of bile in my mouth for you, your company, and your products. Bad news for you, since I can tell about a billion people – not like the old days before blogs.
While I’m sure the iPhone 3G is elegant in design (although I can’t attest to this personally, as I was unable to touch one), something truly elegant would solve problems without creating further ones. You (and I’m fairly certain, purposefully) created problems for customers. You created a form of waste, which gets in the way of value. The line at my local Apple store stretched the length of the large mall containing it, and was estimated at six hours. You see, waiting is a kind of waste – it adds NO value whatsoever. And the thought of the combined lost productivity of all those poor saps in line is staggering. At Toyota, a company I spent nearly a decade with, we called waste MUDA. It’s a Japanese word you need to become familiar with, since you’re so very good at creating it.
You’re also quite good at creating something called MURI, or overload. Because you decided (in what I’m sure you considered a brilliant flash of genius) to launch the iPhone 3G on the same day in over 20 countries, you effectively made it impossible for customers to do what you wanted them to do in the first place: pick up a phone at the store and walk out being able to actually use it. Your retail employees were unable to sync the iPhone with iTunes, which is as I understand it the last step in the activation process. Your attempt to avoid last year’s glitch resulting in people having to activate the phone at home was not only unsolved, but gloriously exacerbated. You locked up not just Apple stores, but ATT stores as well, making it difficult for customers not even considering an iPhone in those stores to experience frustration. On top of that, your ATT partner sold out of the device in like two hours. Good job on estimating demand, a task that couldn’t have been easier given the quite recent numbers from the original iPhone launch a year ago.
Congratulations for a massively, masterfully executed iBlunder.
