Steve Jobs visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1979 was eye-opening, and he moved quickly to seize the opportunity.
“I got our best people together,” Jobs said, “and got them working on (Apple’s version of a graphical user interface).”
Yet it didn’t go well. According to Jobs:
The problem was, we had hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard, and they didn’t get this idea. I remember having dramatic arguments with people who thought the coolest thing was having soft keys at the bottom of the screen. They had no concept of proportionally spaced fonts. No concept of a mouse.
In fact, I remember folks screaming at me that it would take five years to engineer a mouse, and it would cost $300 to build. I finally got fed up and went outside and found David Kelly Design… and in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for $15 that was phenomenally reliable.
Jobs realized, “Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea… there was a core team that did, but there was a larger team that… didn’t have a clue.”
Jobs felt that as company becomes successful, it tends to assume there is “magic” in the process that led to its success, and therefore tries to replicate that process. A cross-functional team created a successful product? Let’s put together a cross-functional team to develop the next product. A customer survey generated the idea for a successful service? Let’s do another survey.