A customer centric approach to marketing and technology

John Naughton writing in the Observer, has an interesting piece on podcasting.
Of course, there are plenty of articles on podcasting, what I really liked was Naughtons observation on Apple and how they have constantly innovated whilst always keeping the end consumer clearly in mind.
This is why Apple has been successful - because they have always made their end consumers more successful. They've enabled many people to do things which they would not have been able to do before and have on the whole made it progressively easy, for the likes of you and me. Perhaps one might use the term 'incremental innovation.'
Naughton opens his piece

The process by which a technology goes from being an arcane technicality to a consumer product is always fascinating. The recent appearance of 'podcasting' on the radar of mainstream media is a delicious case in point.

He then turns his attention to Apple:

Apple is continuing its tradition of taking sophisticated computing technologies and turning them into consumer products. Its already done this with WiFi (Airport), digital music (iTunes), digital photography (iPhoto), home movie editing (iMovie) and DVD authoring (iDVD).
Harnessing all these technologies once required serious technical skills together with a heavy dose of masochism. What Apple's engineers and designers did was to turn them into tools anyone - even newspaper columnists could use.

Apple's mantra is simple
1). Create an experience not an artefact
2). Honour context
3). Design for change
4). Don't forget the human element
Beautifully simple.

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