How Would You Beat Apple Using Jobs-to-be-Done?

Jay Haynes  0:00  

Welcome to our podcast, How Would You Beat? In each episode, we pick a company and talk about how you could use jobs-to-be-done innovation methods to beat that company's product. We'll discuss innovation theory and explain the methods so you can put the theory into practice at your company. I'm Jay Haynes, the founder and CEO of thrv, that's thrv without the vowels thrv.com. We help product marketing and sales teams use jobs-to-be-done innovation methods to build market and sell great products. I'm here with my colleague, Jared Ranere.

Today we're going to talk about Apple, how would you beat Apple? And we've talked about Apple before, as it relates to Apple and Google Maps, which is a very interesting analysis, how would you beat a specific product? Today we're going to talk about more generally as a product strategy. How would you be a company like Apple? And just to review, Apple is almost the size of a nation, it actually is much bigger than a lot of nations. It is huge. It has a market cap of $2 trillion. In the last 12 months, it had $273 billion in revenue, and $67 billion in operating income. So we really do have to think about Apple as a nation. It is that big. And Apple's been in the news recently, which is one of the reasons we thought we would talk about it today, because the famous investor Warren Buffett made $100 billion dollars off of his investment in Apple stock, in which he first made in 2016. So it's been an incredible story. I was first an Apple customer in 1979, which seems like 100 years ago.

So Apple is a dominant company. But are we seeing cracks in Apple?  An interesting statistic is that the number of first time buyers of iPhones has actually declined by 60%. Since 2016. So what does that mean? And if you were trying to beat Apple, how would you do it?

Jared Ranere  2:34  

Yeah, that's fascinating. And part of me wonders about the iPhone statistic. How many people already have iPhones and if that's why there are fewer first time buyers.

Jay Haynes  2:47  

There are,I think,  between 900 million and a billion iPhone users. So there's another 6 billion to go.

Jared Ranere  2:57  

Interesting. I bought my first iPhone, I think like four months ago, because they had made a small one that was great.

But anyways, I mean, what's fascinating about Apple to me is how good they are at reinventing themselves. So,  we're inclined to think about the huge portion of their 273 billion in revenue that comes from hardware sales. But they also have very successfully moved into subscription services in Q4 of 2020, they made $14 billion in subscription services, which would be an enormously successful company on its own, by normal standards of any reckoning. Then we sometimes forget how good Apple is reinventing themselves. They were a PC company. And then with the iPod, they became a portable music company. And then with iTunes, they became a music distributor. And then they got into books and started selling books. Like every time that we go to a company, we talk to them, like how you have to create new products in order to get your customers' job done better in order to stay ahead of the competition. 

People always say, but what if we don't have the right to play there? And I always say, Well, what about a PC company that's now become a music distributor? Did they have the right to play there? And the answer is yes, when they make a product that good. And that's kind of so incredible, that Apple they've grown this revenue by getting jobs done better and better with new technologies as they come up. And what I think is sort of a fun little tidbit about Jay is that he saw this coming back in 2014. That Apple would get even far bigger than it already was, was already worth 450 billion and Jay wrote this post, predicting that Apple would be worth $3 trillion, and that it's at $2 trillion today. It's still undervalued, and he used Warren Buffett's own intrinsic value model plus jobs-to-be-done even before Buffett made that investment. 

So, Jay, can you tell us a little bit about that? Like, how did you figure that out? What was the analysis? 

Jay Haynes  5:13  

Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't want to present myself as some sort of genius. But it wasn't hard to do. So the way Buffett's intrinsic value model works, which works for any company, is that you're essentially saying the value of that company is the discounted value of the future cash that it can generate. So if you're a profitable company, and you're growing,those two things are related. How much are you generating and cash flow that's available, available to the owners of shares? Buffett calls that owners earnings? And then what's the likely growth rate? And you have to plug some numbers into a spreadsheet and look historically what what Apple has done. And basically, my analysis said, Look, Apple has an extraordinary track record of growing over a long time period. And is that growth, can it continue? Now, it's probably not going to continue at that same rate. So I took a lower rate and said, well, even at this lower rate of growth, Apple is still worth $3 trillion.

So those were the days. He was using it for work stuff, because there was a thing called visicalc, which was a spreadsheet, which was kind of a killer app at the time. He was an entrepreneur, so he wanted to run stuff on the spreadsheet. But of course, I used it to learn how to program so I could make video games.

But what's what's interesting is then he very shortly after that in the 80s, because he was a business person bought an IBM compatible, you remember, like, compact was one of the brands and they were known as IBM compatible computers, because this small company called Microsoft had licensed their PC operating system to to IBM and a license to other people. So you could make a computer that was IBM compatible. And back then Apple came out with the Macintosh and opened up with a smiley face. And so immediately, our family's first computer, yeah, my dad thought it was a toy. So he was like, Oh, this is not a serious work machine I need, I need a green screen where I'm entering code to like, look at my files.  I could never explain, I always just withdraw into the back. And I started doing music on the Mac, and the Mac was paid for music, and of course, the creative arts. And I wrote all my college papers on it. And I couldn't explain why it was better. I had no reference. Really not many people could. But this is where jobs-to-be-done comes into play. It was clearly helping me get different jobs done faster and more accurately. And that's the core of all innovation. 

If you look at Apple success, from day one, until today, it's getting jobs done faster and more accurately. So what I was doing in 2014 is looking at Apple and saying, Okay, if you apply jobs to beat on theory, and you imply and you just did the math on Buffett's intrinsic value model, you have a pretty reasonable expectation that Apple is going to continue to grow. Because growth comes from getting the jobs done better. And Jared, as you mentioned, there's no company better at reinventing itself. And Apple, its name used to be Apple Computer. And they actually got rid of the name because they realized we're not a computer company. We're doing all these things. Now they're doing some things that I think are straying away. They're making like television shows with Jennifer Aniston. So whether or not they should do that, that's an interesting question.

Jared Ranere  9:48  

Ted Laso is  terrific though, if you haven't seen it. 

Jay Haynes  9:50  

I think most TV shows are just incredibly violent today but so that's all the discussion as well. But back in 2014, that's when I really because we'd been doing jobs-to-be-done for work for a while as you applied it to Apple, it made a lot of sense. It explained everything, not just like, why there's a smiley face, but why the products were really successful. And in fact, in 2015, in Fortune, which we should link to for people. Fortune wrote about Phil Schiller,  who's been an Executive at Apple for decades, he's,  definitely one of the number two, three people in the company. His grand unified theory of Apple is actually based on jobs-to-be-done thinking. And that's what was really fascinating,  You could see this from an outsider, if you knew jobs-to-be-done theory. But to have Phil himself say, it was pretty amazing. And, he got it almost right, which I also think is really interesting. He said we asked, What's the job of the watch? What is the job of the phone? It is to do what,  what is the job of the iPad, what's the job of the notebook, and then all the way up to what's the job of a super powerful Macintosh. And so they have this type of thinking at Apple, I think, more than any other company in the world. And I think that explains a lot of their success.

Jared Ranere  11:16  

Yeah, and one of the things that's interesting about the article in Fortune, where Phil Schiller lays out these jobs, he says, The job of the iPad is to do as much as you possibly can, before you need a laptop. And the job of the laptop is to do  everything you can't do with an iPad, and then everything you could possibly think of after that, until you need the Mac, which is the most powerful computer you can find. And the job is all based on all their products, which I think is interesting, because we typically say that a good job to be done to target is product agnostic, right? It doesn't include products and technologies, because then your job remains stable over time. And if the job of the iPhone is to do things that the iPad can't. Well, that's inherently not stable Because the iPads functionality is going to change over time and what it can do, or vice versa, right? The iPhone is going to change. Maybe someday there won't be an iPad.  All these things are changeable. 

So it seems like not great job definitions. But then when you think about, if you worked internally at Apple, and you were working on something like the Macbook, or the iPhone, how would you define it in terms of one job? And the reason I asked this question is because through the app store, you can get pretty much any job done. A developer can create an app to do almost anything with an iPhone. So it's hard to say like, this is the one job that we focus on. There are many job domains, and because of the extensibility of the app store's kind of like a job getting done machine. So how would you approach that? How would you even begin to talk about that internally? If you worked at Apple? 

Jay Haynes  13:14  

Yeah, I think there's two great things to talk about there. How would Apple think about it internally? And then second, how would you think about it as a competitor to Apple, right, you wanted to beat Apple? So the two super important questions, and I think internally, you have to break it down. So if you're on the OS level, and and by the way, Apple made this mistake, remember, before Steve Jobs came back, they almost went out of business. They famously had like 60 or 90 days of cash when Steve Jobs came back. And  they could have easily gone out of business. And that's because they didn't fully embrace, I think they recognized it, but they didn't fully embrace that a computer or a tiny computer in your pocket called a phone for some reason. Is actually a platform to get multiple jobs done. So if you're on the OS team at Apple, obviously, what you have to do is think about how are you going to enable other companies to use your platform to help get jobs done? Are those health jobs, the education jobs that they finance jobs, or that  entertainment jobs, creative jobs, whatever they are. 

This is Marc Andreessen’s point about software eating the world. What does that mean? That just seems like some crazy,  venture capitalist catchphrase. But the way that we see it and explain it is the reason software is so incredibly important in our lives, is when you're trying to achieve any goal, whether it's a health goal,  finance goal, professional goal, career goal,  whatever. All jobs are just goals or training to achieve independence are the products that all of those jobs require information. And you have to gather that information, you have to analyze the information, you have to make sure it's accurate. And you have to make decisions with that information. And then you have to make these assessments about whether it's going well, you have to make revisions. And all software does that incredibly well. Because there's so much information based jobs. Even something like exercising, which is very physical, still has a huge information component, like what do you want to do to optimize your health through exercise. You need to know an incredible amount of information to get that job done better. And, I like exercising, but I like exercising in what Tim Ferriss calls the minimum effective dose, right. So I'm not looking to exercise five hours a day, I'm looking to exercise seven minutes a day, if that's going to get me to the optimal session. 

Even though those types of jobs, there's information, so yeah, and even, it's interesting to think about how software can turn jobs that require physical actions into now what are decisions. So if you think about shopping for groceries, you used to have to go to the store, and actually pick the groceries out, put them in your cart, take them in your car, and bring them home. And now you can just make decisions and click because half work and get the groceries delivered to you. And that happens over and over again, as jobs go from analog to software. Oh, even even better. I love this grocery,  shopping, cooking,  we have four daughters. So we've got six mouths to feed every night.

Eliminate the grocery shopping. I know one option is Instacart. But I've literally signed up for every  food delivery service, whether it was  Blue Apron where you still have to make the whole meal. Gobble, which is a version that their tagline was great, was like 10 minutes, one pan. And then any I've even microwave food, but that doesn't taste good. It's not healthy, obviously. Then there was Brava, this new oven that uses light to cook, which has been really great. But I thought Brava was going to just send you meals you put into the oven, and it's done. So there's this other company that I just discovered called Tovala. And it is an oven, but it's also a meal delivery service. So you just put the meal in, and it's a steam oven. Even that is a case where innovation can get rid of the product, which is a grocery store is the solution. And if even you can get rid of the grocery store,  even better. So yeah, it is, of course the way innovation always happens.

But I think, Jared, to your point about then what do you do internal Apple, if you're not on the team?  yeah, and that's where you do have to think about what the customer's job is, whatever the app is, and let me give you a good example where I think Apples did a terrible job as their recent exercise competitor. Basically, it's a Peloton and a lot of other apps.  It's essentially, they have an exercise coach who sits there and it's a more beautiful studio because Apple does things that are beautiful, which is nice, fine. But it's not any different. It really is not different than literally hundreds of apps that are out there including Peloton, right? Which you can use without the Peloton. It's like, hey, let's do jumping jacks for 10 minutes, or we're gonna do core work, or we're gonna do whatever, it doesn't track any of that. It doesn't say, Jay, you're trying to lose 15 pounds or Jay you're trying to prevent heart disease, or Jay, you need to,  reduce your risk for diabetes. And here's all the metrics.  This is just designed exactly for you, Jay. And you only need to do it the minimum amount every day with  not too much expense. It's just a copycat. 

And that's really unfortunate to see from Apple for a couple reasons. One, it's not innovative at all, it doesn't get the job done better at all. You look at Peloton versus Apple's exercise, not not different in any way. Now, they innovated on the watch and the little rings, and that seems to encourage people which is great, but the actual exercises themselves are nothing different. They're really disappointing. And the other thing is they should not be allowed to be in that market. And here's the argument: This is where Apple's kind of at the status of a nation. They're using their platform to then basically get people to use Apple's App instead of there's literally probably 1000s of trainers who have created their own apps.  Even Peloton, which has become a big company is smaller than Apple, and we're diminishing the competition in that market. And especially when it's just not innovative, which it's not I would argue from what Apple's doing. They will take share. They will put people, small businesses, smaller businesses out of business just because they have the platform and they own it. And,  that's a whole other discussion. 

Jared Ranere  20:08  

And they have the users close at hand. 

Jay Haynes  20:10  

Yep. 

Jared Ranere  20:10  

Yeah, I think what's related to what you're talking about, and a little bit aside of the monopoly discussion is, that's interesting. It sounds like when you're talking about the OS level, and the hardware itself. Apple's extremely good at that, and does get the jobs done much better. They enable developers to build things on that platform that are much better than what can be built on other platforms. And in one way, it's almost like the customer they're focused on is the developer. And the job then can be actually much easier to think about, because you're thinking about what is the what's the goal of the developer? And what do what are their needs, as opposed to all the consumers who are trying to get a million things done. And what's interesting about the move from hardware sales to services, is that the service is direct to consumer. You're not building it for developers, you're not enabling a developer in that case, right? You're building something that's supposed to be great on its own. And Apple Music is a great example where they enter that business. And they're getting growth, it seems because it's the default application in the iPhone. 

So the 900 million people that use that, and don't think to go download Spotify, use Apple Music, and is growing sort of at a fairly tepid rate given the potential. But Spotify is much better, it's getting the job done much better. And it was way ahead of Apple Music until Apple Music launched. And I haven't looked at the numbers recently. But you can, you could see a pattern here where maybe Apple is not as good at figuring out consumers jobs and their unmet needs and generating software and services that get those done better than other products could. So one way to beat Apple is to tightly focus, right, instead of trying to build hardware that to beat them, you focused on a small number of jobs. And what's interesting here is that if you remember when the iPhone launched in 2007, it didn't have an app store. It didn't try to get a million jobs done. Well. It tried to get three,  you could argue is a little more because internet communications enables a lot of jobs. But the way that Steve Jobs presented, it was three jobs. It was phone communication, internet communication, and music. And that's it. And then they expanded on that platform. 

So when you think about beating a giant competitor, Nokia was selling a lot of phones at the time. And blackberry was two inch got totally destroyed by the iPhone who was tightly focused on doing things differently in those tight jobs. So when you think about beating Apple now, it might not be build a better phone. It might be pick jobs smartly that Apple's not doing all that well on and think about how can you generate a platform out of getting that job done much better that you can expand to other jobs.

Jay Haynes  23:14  

Yeah, I think that's right. And you, you pointed out something that I think is really important as well is, you're not going to beat Apple going head to head with a phone. It's just never competition and changes and markets never work like that. Even the iPhone versus the Blackberry. The black iPhone has a phone in its name. But it's not a phone. Right. And it's not a text entry device.

Jared Ranere  23:45  

It was actually worse at being a phone. Yeah, that's right. Your reception was bad for a while. 

Jay Haynes  23:49  

Yeah, no. And typing was worse. Right. So if you viewed what the thing was a mobile typing device,  it was definitely worse. So I think that's right. But the other is, if you're going to compete with Apple, you shouldn't even think of yourself as an app developer. That's another problem. So if now the problem is, of course, there have been startups that have been acquired for a billion dollars with no revenue, like Instagram, right? It created, it got sold, it only had an iPhone app. So it just looks like, Hey, if you're a startup, or if you're a competitor, let's just launch an app. And we'll get really successful by having an app. But that's not the way you should think about it. Because I guarantee you one thing, I will make this prediction, I might be dead by the time it comes true. But there will come a day when we're not using our phones. Absolutely. We're not going to stare at these little devices at the rate we do now.

I also predicted that if that's true, if that never ends, humanity will come to an end and there'll be no at the end of civilization. 

Jared Ranere  24:53  

Well, I actually think that  feature is not all that far off. I am aware of technologists that really important companies that are working  that problem every day, how do we get people to stare at phones last? 

Jay Haynes  25:03  

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it actually will, will happen because that's no one's goal, no one's goal, stare at their phone all day, it's to connect their family and friends and have meaningful,  creative lives.

So what I will say is, so if you're trying to beat Apple, let's take health, for example, to think of yourself as an app developer for health is the wrong way to think about it. Because one health if you're if you're thinking about exercise,  we're trying to get people to optimize their health through exercise. There's so much complexity in there, there's so no, an app might be part of the solution. And it certainly is gonna be part of the solution in the short term. But there's so much else that goes on to a job, we have that level of complexity, and most jobs have that level of complexity. So if you're trying to think, oh, gosh, how do we respond to the fact that Apple now has these studios where they have,  nice trainers jumping around telling you to,  do squats and jumping, jumping jacks, like that is just not the way to compete? 

The way to compete is to first figure out where's the underserved segment? And this,  to build a product strategy, you want to figure out who's that underserved segment? And then really, what does it take to serve those people. And that is where jobs-to-be-done is so powerful, and enables you to differentiate and you can tell Apples not using jobs to be done in their exercise app that I would not consider the I mean, it could be successful, because I own the platform. And you're right, and,  out of,  900 million customers, if 100 million of them use it, it's a huge success.  So that is the approach to beating Apple like you did just going head to head with, like, we're gonna create a new phone with just,  yeah, miserable. 

Jared Ranere  26:48  

It's interesting, because the platform owners, as you describe the iPhone and the Apple ecosystem, as a platform, there's kind of like easy money for them, right? The first,  10% of their users adopting anything, when they have that many users, they're going to make money on it, and it's probably going to be profitable. And so when you are trying to compete with that, you have to go for the hard money in a way, You're, you're not going to get the easy money, or the dumb money, you might call it as readily because you don't own the audience. That's where it's kind of where the 10x better comes in. Because you have to not only build something that gets the job done, but it has to be so much better than what's already in the existing platform that your customers potentially using, that they're willing to switch from that platform to use your thing, which is why I think people use the app store as a channel to get customers because the users are already there. But I think if the analogy to what you were saying, Jay about, you can't think of yourself as an app developer. Imagine if Steve Jobs thought of himself as a PC maker. Before he created the iPod, he never would have created it and music would have been hard to listen to on the go, we might still be using Walkmans, who knows, or like mp3 players that weren't all that great.

And Microsoft never would have developed the Zune. So they might have saved some money, but the point is, you have to think about yourself as like, how am I going to get this job done and what technologies are available to me to make that happen. And that's where you might find an opportunity to generate a new platform that gets one job done, much, much better than it can get done today with the existing solutions in the market. And then could provide the springboard, literally the platform to do other jobs with that new technology. And Steve Jobs with iPhone, interestingly, put together a bunch of new technologies, including just the glass.  Going to Corning and getting Gorilla Glass, right? It was what's called Gorilla Glass, I think?  it was super hard glass that wouldn't break. And he had Corning developed it with him. He put a lot of new technologies together. And he famously did that with the Gooey and the original Mac to write like he didn't invent the mouse, and the graphical user interface. He adopted it from somewhere else. And that ability to find those technologies and figure out how to put them together to get the job done, rather than be a product maker is really magical. And that's where you can find opportunities to beat a company like Apple, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And

Jay Haynes  29:36  

I want to say,  I do love Apple, I've been an Apple customer since 1979. Kind of like when we talked about Tesla, you invested in Tesla stock and I bought a Tesla and  I kind of should have invested Apple stock rather than buying their products. But I bought a lot of Apple products and  we're an entire Apple family. All four of my children are on Apple devices, especially now they're in virtual school during COVID. My wife and I, all Apple all the time. But, I will say, I have disappointment in a lot of what Apple's doing recently.Because the exercise app was just like a tiny example. But even their movement in the media, like, sure, they're probably going to make money on  TV shows whether it's, Jennifer Aniston and Ted Laso or whatever. 

That is really the dent in the universe that we're looking for, given what the world is going through, given that half the people, almost half the people in the United states don't have $400, their name. And they are the size of a nation. So does that part of the US represent no market opportunity, they can't figure out a way to make those people's lives better in any way? They're not even trying it from what I can see, which is very sad, because I think those problems are going to get worse. That's a whole other conversation. 

I also do think that's where someone can beat Apple is looking at these really underserved markets with people that really do have real problems in their lives. I mean, hey, look, I love the new air pod feature that automatically switches device. But what I see Apple doing recently is I would call them technical convenience features. Like if you're already a user, that is nice. But does that change my life? And does that make our society and the world a better place? Really, I don't think so. And that's what I find disappointing is they're not looking at the world and looking at all these jobs, that there are huge growth opportunities for it's literally like half the United States, right. And if companies can't figure out how to help transform our country and  create a better future, then then we are really in trouble. I mean, and there's a role for the government to play as well. But this is why we focus on innovation with companies is because we have to innovate, we have to create new ways of getting jobs done that are really meaningful in people's lives. Now, having said all that, I tell my friends at Apple and I are kind of having marital problems. 

The things that I think they are doing really, really well is in summary, it's their battle with Facebook, I think this is incredibly important. Our society, that privacy completely changes that people own their own data that you don't have companies like Facebook, and  is Google as well, and YouTube and social networks who use divisive algorithms to generate more views to sell ads to  we've talked about this before, but that I do. And I hope that it's sincere in the company, that it's a vision that they have that like there is a better world because we didn't  if people have more protection against this type of stuff, it's a better world, rather than just saying like, Oh, yeah, we're Apple, we don't sell ads. 

Jared Ranere  33:32  

There was I add at one point, do you know if that still exists, I could shut down? 

Jay Haynes  33:37  

I don't think it does. But I do think, I don't know, we'd have to investigate that. But I do know that you can advertise in the App Store. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean, and you and I've talked about this,  on other podcasts, but ads aren't necessarily bad. If you're looking to get a job suggestions of things that could solve your problems, right? Your child. Nobody looks at it that way. Some health problem. You want to know what's out there, right? You want an ad saying, yes. solve your child's health problem? Or your own? Yes. So yeah, so ads are necessarily bad. That's a whole other conversation. But I do think their stance on privacy is fantastic. 

Jared Ranere  34:13  

Yeah, well, the only reason I thought about it was because their business model of we try to create something so good that you're willing to pay for it, rather than we're going to give it away for free. enables them to have stances like this where they can hold security and confidentiality and own your own data as a key value and actually follow through with it because they don't need that to make more money. And I think that that's really important to think about, right? What is your business model? And what will that incentivize you to do,  people will talk sometimes about well, it's good to have free products because it creates more access to technology and I gotta say there's a double edged sword. Right? There's a well known jazz musician who's a friend who once said to me, he was asked by his school to play a concert for free. And he said growing up in New Orleans and gigging The one thing I learned is if  I'm playing music, somebody is getting paid. And it better be me. 

I think about the same thing, if when you're using a product, like if somebody built some technology for you to use, somebody is getting paid. And you better know who it is. Because you may not be a customer, you might be a product. And I think we need to think really hard about that. Right? When people say, Oh, we want to provide access, okay, well, does your business model enable you to provide access in a way that's not actually hurting your user? Right, and, and when your customer is somebody entirely different Apples on the right side of that, given their business model, and it gives them freedom to do things that other companies can now it also puts them in position of being a premium product and a lot of ways so that I think it's an interesting question, Jay, what can they do to move out of premium segments, and still be profitable and get jobs done really effectively without turning the customer into a product? 

Jay Haynes  36:18  

Yeah. And that's, I think that's a great question. And we can talk about that on another podcast. But  in short, it is looking for those opportunities, where customers are struggling to get a job done, and you can figure out solutions at a price they are willing to pay. Or you can create a model that is subsidizing those users into the system that doesn't necessarily have to be advertising, you can be information based. And of course, you can also contribute your data voluntarily, in exchange for value that isn't gonna generate divisive and hateful algorithms.

So there's lots of ways to approach that, I think is a much longer discussion. But I think in short, if How would you beat Apple is a great question. And a great thing to think about. I'd first by saying I still think Apple’s undervalued Not that I make stock recommendations that anybody but I think the $3 trillion number holds that I was calculated in 2014, I should go back and redo that spreadsheet, because it's probably even bigger now. But I think the way to be the first is not to think of your competing on the phone level. I mean, we've already got these two huge platforms,  Android and iOS. And to not think about it even as an app developer, like they're gonna compete through them specific apps, you have to look at the customer's job and build a product strategy. That likely entails an app, not on a phone alone, but also probably on the web on a PC, but also on whatever devices emerge. And maybe it includes hardware and services like, Don't limit yourself to thinking your product strategy has to be some app on a phone or some hardware device alone. And right. And I think you see that you can even see that in health, right? Peloton. Is Peloton software hardware, right? Well, it's both and services to. So when you think outside of the box, cliche, but literally outside of the software and outside of the hardware. Yeah,  you think like your customers and empathize with them. 

Jared Ranere  38:35  

And one, one last quick thought on who the customer is, you could also take a lesson from Apple, right? They didn't with the iPhone, they didn't go straight for the business customer where blackberry had their stronghold At first, they started with consumers who would be more interested in listening to music and  General communication jobs, and not business jobs. And then over time they overtook them. And that's another way to think about how to compete with Apple. Is there a niche of a customer who's looking to get a more specific job done that you can help with that isn't going directly after the people who love Apple the most? 

Jay Haynes  39:13  

Yeah, and we don't talk about that enough. But I think that's a great thing to close on is that, and we see this a lot with companies that can't even define who their customer is. And the reason I think it's so important. Your point about  who is an Apple customer that's actually interesting, is there are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different types of customers, whether their parents and their pre parenting or they're empty nesters or retirees or whatever, whether you're cardiovascular surgeons or a VP of finance or operations, they're just literally hundreds of different customers. And we always refer to them as the job beneficiaries, because they're the person the actual humans from who benefit from getting the job done. And Apple famously did this. You're exactly right.

So that happens in every market. Apple was very, very good at that. And that's true. If you're going to beat Apple. Definitely Think about it this way. Think about it from the job beneficiary not the job executor and then innovate for that job beneficiary.