Thursday, August 23, 2007

More product insight from the 6-yr old

"Dad", he said, sitting in front of the Mac at home, which is right next to his admittedly older hand-me-down wintel laptop, "Macs are the best computers, aren't they"... It wasn't a question at all (hey, Steve, are you listening? or are you sick of all this praise?). He was just looking for acknowledgment that he was right. "What makes you say that?", I asked, conveniently forgetting that I have an apple sticker on my wintel notebook 'as a statement' (that's the answer I gave about 5 times over the past week when people mentioned it's presence).
Now, if you read this far, you may as well pay attention, because here's the insightful part... He said, "Well, the Mac takes, like, not even a minute to turn on, but the laptop takes, like, forever!"
I was hit with that "oh yeah" brick in the head with that simple insight - that something as simple as boot-up time might actually be the differentiator for some people... in fact, it might end up being the differentiator for me. When I want something fast off the web, and neither machine is on, I pop on the Mac - and that happens more and more these days.

I was about to give him the "some people think Macs are best and other people think..." and then stopped myself and said "You're right"... realizing that speed - actually, convenience - really does drive customer perception and brand value...

"Give the Governor a harumph!" - Hedley Lamarr

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jonathan,

Enjoying your blog. Re: bootstrap speed, have you upgraded to Vista on any of your machines? I'm always impressed with how quickly it's ready for action after a shutdown/startup, especially if you use the default Sleep shutdown, which keeps all the apps you had running ready to go.

Cheers,
Michael (Muchmore--one of the guilty of commenting on the Apple sticker on the ThinkPad.)

Anonymous said...

Michael,

It's funny to read your comment re. "sleep". If you google "vista sleep" it seems the user community is divided between those whose PC does not wake up from sleep, and those whose machines don't sleep at all - I'm in the latter camp.

JR said...

Hey Michael,
I haven't vista-rized yet... We'll see which comes first - an upgrade or a switch to match my sticker ;)
Thanks for the comment...
JR