Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth

There's a great article from the Harvard Business Review about Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth that is worth mentioning here since it encapsulates a much bigger topic and fallacy in many people's minds - not just for Apple, but for product design and marketing in general.

Basically, the misconception is that Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone and iPad and other products one day, manufactured it the next, and as a result dominated the market. The "eureka" of those products and their "magic" isn't nearly as simple. The were years of ideas and multiple generations of protoypes that went into both products.

In fact, the "eureka" moment came after many trials AND errors, tweaks, improvements, corrected paths and feedback loops. While Jobs and his team were indeed more inwardly focused than the standard market research processes, there was no reduction in a prototyping and test process.

There was no magic - but there was good process and vision.