Tony Fadell: belief

Transcript context

…It was the most heated conversation and it dragged out the longest. There was one way of looking at the BlackBerry, which was that is the market we want to go after or we want to win. And then there's the other side, the flip side of that argument, which is only 1% or 2% of mobile phone users at the time had a BlackBerry, knew what a BlackBerry was. So what about the other 98% of the people? What would they want? What would they need? Why are we going to go after winning this very loyal and incredibly passionate user base and try to pull them away from something? And so there was this basically head-to-head competition between a display keyboard or virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard. I had been doing virtual keyboards for a while since General Magic in the '90s, and I knew what handwriting was and keyboards were like on these touchscreens and... but I was only doing it on a... and I was writing software and calibrating them and trying to make them work with a single-touch display, resistive or what have you. And so I knew what the limitations were of those kinds of things. So I was like, "Hmm, this is really going to be difficult." And we had... Multitouch just was on a big ping-pong table. It hadn't been scaled down, so it wasn't like something in a consumptive form where you could really do user test with it. And so we set out a set of tests like, "Okay, how fast can I type this text? How fast can I do this on a hardware keyboard? And then how can we do this on the virtual one with multitouch?" And it was a hardware-software integration challenge of how we could get this to work. So we were going back and forth and back and forth, "Oh, that doesn't quite work in the software. Oh, we need to change this in the hardware." And so this was over a set of months would, "Okay, the hardware keyboards here," and depends on how... how much you've been using it, but there's this margin error, and we could really understand it. This, over time, was started way down here, and it started to get it, and it got a little faster and a little faster and a little faster. And how many errors, not just how fast, but how many errors, and how do you correct the errors, and all of those things. And at the end of the day, I was able to convince myself it wasn't going to be a hardware issue, and I was convinced at some point that we were good enough. Were we as good as a hardware keyboard? No. But were we good enough? Yes. And then other people came to that conclusion, but at the same time, there were other people who were adamant that the hardware keyboard has to be there, and they were unrelenting. And so it came down to... So this was a classic, like I say in Build, data versus opinion-based decision. And if you think about it, you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides. And what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other. And Steve said, "We are going this way." about it, you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides. And what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other. And Steve said, "We are going this way." Enough other people kind of said, "Yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do. We're going to get close enough to get there." And then other people were like, " No, my opinion is this. " And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve Jobs' opinion does. Steve Jobs.…

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