It seems the surest way to announce that your company, products and employees lack genius is to rely heavily on market research and focus groups. What you’re basically saying is that you know you can’t be ahead of the curve so you’d like someone else to help you just keep up. When Steve Jobs was working on the iPad and wanted to rely on touch screens rather than a stylus, his judgement was questioned, particularly because he didn’t do any market research. His response was: “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” realizing on his own that moving from mouse to stylus wasn’t a bold step into the future. And I think most great things have been created by one or two people who just knew. There aren’t enough of those people to go around, so we get focus groups instead. (George Lois agrees with me.)

Jobs obviously wasn’t the first one attempt popularizing touch-screen. In the 1983 edition of Computer Chronicles below, Hewlett-Packard reps share their own touch-screen technology. I wonder what market research said about it back then. By the way: The younger host on your right is Gary Kildall.