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Designer's Digest - Steve Jobs on the role of product and marketing people.

Designer's Digest · 212.2K views · 2018-11-16 · 2:31

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Overview

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

On Hacker News

Cited constantly on HN whenever a large company declines, as the canonical explanation of product people being pushed out by sales and marketing.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Product, marketing & salesTech pioneers & interviewsManagement, leadership & organizations
Search by tags
steve jobsproduct managementmonopoliescompany declinexerox

What people said

29athrowaway · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

They boost the share price for a while, but then the competition takes over. Steve Jobs has the best explanation for this. [VIDEO]

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deckard1 · 2022-08 · Recommendation

> resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering Steve Jobs calls this out wonderfully here: [VIDEO] > [...] the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...] the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to the monopolistic position gets rotted out. By people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.

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conception · 2026-08 · Reference

[VIDEO] Steve Jobs talking about Apple of the future. (His comments on product people running a company vs sales)

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Sources

Video by Designer's Digest, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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