Chapter 10 Section 9: Confronting Apple (1)

Chapter 1 Opportunities hide in problems - A circus without animals and clowns Excavated the gap in the demand for baby diapers and designed "pull-up pants" - an increase in annual sales of one billion US dollars. "There is nothing I can't do" - dare to think, dare to break, problems can be turned into opportunities. Why, in everyday life, do most people fail to see problems as opportunities?Why does the student team mentioned above have to wait until the classwork is assigned before they can try to surpass their limits and use their imagination?The root cause is that we are always taught to avoid problems, to complain about them, not to embrace them.

Once, I was invited to give a speech at a corporate executive training conference, and I played several videos of innovation contests during my speech.In the afternoon, a company CEO came to me and said with emotion that he especially hoped to return to school and accept the challenges of various open questions in order to improve his innovation ability.I looked at him, a little puzzled.I'm sure this CEO faces real-life challenges of all kinds every day, unconsciously thinking about problems in an innovative way, and he has benefited a lot from it.Unfortunately, he didn't realize that innovation is closely related to his life and work. He thought that the tasks I assigned could only be performed in a controlled environment like a school.Of course that is far from the case.

We can challenge ourselves every day.In other words, we can see the world through a different pair of glasses—glasses that allow us to see things from a new perspective.The more problems we face, the more confident and skilled we are at solving them, and the easier it is to see problems as opportunities. against apple Attitude is perhaps the most important factor in determining how successful people are.True innovators dare to face the difficulties head on and overturn inherent traditional assumptions.Jeff Hawkins hoped to develop a compact and portable personal computer, which was an ambitious goal at the time, and he encountered numerous difficulties and challenges in the process of realizing his goal.In fact, Jeff believes that being an entrepreneur means constantly encountering difficult problems and having to find innovative ways to solve them.

Jeff had problems from the start.After the release of his first new product, the Palm Zoomer, it failed miserably.However, Jeff and his team did not give up because of this. They called customers who bought Zoomer and rival Apple's Newton products and asked them what features of the products they bought.Customers responded that they wanted a product that would help them manage complex schedules and bring multiple schedules together.Only then did Jeff realize that Zoomer should not compete with similar computer products. Its real opponent is the traditional paper schedule.This unexpected customer feedback, although negating Jeff's original vision, provided useful information for the design of their next-generation product, the hugely successful "palm pilot."

Jeff also led the team to solve the headache of how users would enter information into this tiny new device.Jeff believes that in addition to the small keyboard, it is very important to realize the user's handwriting input, which can make the input process more humane.However, handwriting recognition programs were too immature at the time to realize his vision.So Jeff and his team developed a new language, Graffiti, that is easier for computers to recognize.The proposal to introduce a new language sparked opposition within the company, but Jeff was confident that users would be willing to spend a little time up front to save even more time later. Graffiti is an extremely bold innovation, it challenges all the rules, but it really solves the problem.

Jeff Hawkins is the perfect example of a problem solver who can see the world from a new perspective.Jeff's new company, Numenta, is based on his own theory of how the brain works.In order to explore the way of human thinking, Jeff spent several years teaching himself neuroscience, and threw out a convincing and shocking theory.This theory is about the process of processing information in the neocortex of the brain, which is elaborated in his book - "On Intelligence".Jeff decided to use these theories as a basis to develop "smarter" computers that simulate the processing of information in the human brain.