I am fascinated by your book and I think it’s got so much application specifically for the entrepreneurs that we work with.
My passion has always been working with entrepreneurs and helping entrepreneurs.
It really got me to think that when I was out there in the financial world working with businesses, this whole issue of making decisions specifically when it comes to products and services … crippled people, Kevin. It really did whether a business was small or large, whether they’re making financial decisions for us or whether they’re making business decisions for them. I was attracted to your work.
I have to ask you, you talk about the tradeoff between quality and convenience or being the best and being convenient. What do you make of the mayhem of at least here on the West Coast to the new iPhone release yesterday?
Apple has been the king of constantly creating this high fidelity version of the product that makes them — I mean, it’s perfect it fits perfectly in the description of the book that it creates extreme desire and it doesn’t matter if there is, as with the iPhone 4, extremely inconvenient to get. You go stand in line or register to buy it two seconds after midnight when it goes on sale. It has cache and the cool factor, the bragging rights of being able to say, I bought this and I have this. They’re masters at it. They’re just absolutely masters at creating this super high fidelity product that everybody feels like they have to have no matter how hard it is to get.
It’s definitely not high convenience although they claim it is high convenience.
Convenience, the definition in the book is how easy it is for someone to get something and enjoy it. The iPhone itself is not particularly easy to get. Even on the user experience side of things, there is a certain inconvenience to the iPhone. It’s on a terrible network with AT&T that everybody complains about. It has a history of so many things like dropping calls and not having some of the functionality that actually other cell phones that don’t quite have the same image have on them but it doesn’t matter because Apple has been able to create this aura about the iPhone that just can’t be beat by anybody else no matter how hard they try.
Do you have one?
I don’t.
Probably a good thing.
I own one of those recent models of the Motorola Android phone. I do a lot of email on my phone. I can’t deal with the onscreen keyboard of the iPhone. I wanted something that had the availability of apps and the kind of capabilities of an iPhone but that had the actual thumb keyboard. Motorola’s Android I think is a terrific product. The Android marketplace is pretty quickly catching up to the Apple app store in terms of number of apps and having pretty much anything you’d wanted as in the other.