In some companies, the CEO is simply a business person. Their job is to steer the company in the right direction by approving the best product lines and marketing approaches. However, these business-oriented CEOs often leave the creative aspects of creating products to others. This has never been true of Steve Jobs. When Jobs held the position of CEO of Apple, he was always seen as its chief innovator. In fact, it’s no stretch to say that the company is where it is today because of Jobs. Following his death, many have wondered if Apple will continue its innovative approach to creating electronics.

Jobs is Apple’s most famous co-founder. While Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula, Jr., never became household names, Jobs has almost been synonymous with Apple from the beginning. One look at how the company began floundering during the twelve years Jobs spent away from Apple (between 1985 and 1997), it seems obvious that his innovative ideas were what drove Apple. Not only did Jobs come up with many concepts for products, he also was a great leader. He encouraged Apple team members to bring forth their own ideas, and his inspiration brought out the best in others. He had a vision for his company, and it was well-known that this vision drove him to excellence.

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Whenever stakeholders are involved in either business decisions or software development, they will place specific requirements forward that are required or desired through the development of the program or business model. Prioritising these requirements is a vital component in the ultimate success of the project and the MoSCoW Method is a technique that is used to simplify the process.

Stakeholders can be defined as any individual, whether part of the business or client, who has a vested interest in whatever development is being planned. A stakeholder could be the owner of a company, executives, investors, or even a single client who requires a specific software program developed for a singular need.

The MoSCoW Method aims to create an easily definable process of understanding priorities and in which order they are most significant. Developed by Dai Clegg, an Oracle UK Consultant, he eventually donated the intellectual property rights to the MoSCoW Method to the Dynamic Systems Development Method Consortium (DSDM).

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The Kano Model is used in product development and focuses on the features of a particular product and customer satisfaction. It has a number of components to the model itself and is broken down into five key categories: one-dimensional quality, attractive quality, must-be quality, indifferent quality, and reverse quality.

The Kano Model was created by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s and has since become an integral aspect of product development for many companies around the world. The underlying concept behind the Kano Model is that consumers have particular needs (must haves) and desires (wants) that they both consciously and unconsciously look for in the products they purchase. This is true for both regular necessities as well as one-time purchases.

The Five Key Categories of the Kano Model
The following list breaks down the five categories of the Kano Model:

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Apple has never simply followed the crowd or created products that fit the norm. Instead, they’ve always focused on creating innovative products that change the market. Even as early as the first Macintosh computer, Apple wanted something different. They didn’t want to make just another computer—they wanted to change how people interacted and used their computers. Much of this innovation was due to Steve Jobs, and it became apparent just how much of Apple was Jobs and his imagination during the twelve years he was away from the company.

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. With the help of Mike Markkula, Jr., and his business capital, Apple debuted their first computer, the Apple II, in 1978. This radically different machine became very popular, and even after IBM launched their line of PCs, Apple still held a good share of the market. Their proprietary operating system, which was designed from the ground up, was matched by unique hardware that couldn’t as easily be cloned, but Apple’s simplicity and unique products made them more than a match for IBM at first. However, even after the Macintosh computer was introduced in 1984, Apple was on a downward slope, and it didn’t help matters when Jobs was forced out of the company by the Board of Directors in 1985.

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Apple’s products are often innovative, unique, and successful. Why? Because the company has never been afraid to take risks and experiment. But Apple has experimented with more than just their product line. Their marketing strategies and business decisions have often been criticized, but no one can say they weren’t bold or daring. Many different Apple ideas have certainly seemed radical at the time, and some were classified as ridiculous or business-ending at the time. In retrospect, Apple has been often ahead of the times, especially when the company was led by Steve Jobs.

Apple’s experimentation and bold direction were obvious from the start. While the PC market became full of competitors of clones, Apple kept its operating system to themselves and, with the exception of a short period of time, has never licensed it to others. This would, at first, seem to put them at a disadvantage since it meant Apple was the first and last source for Macintosh computers. This put a limit on their supply, and many thought it would also lead to stagnation or a lack of innovation. The iPod Mini was one bold experiment that paid off. On paper, it seems like a failure: yes, it’s smaller, but it also holds less music. Why would customers purchase a device that holds less data and was only slightly cheaper? But the fact that the iPod Mini was available in different colors and was smaller made it popular, and Apple saw another one of its innovative ideas flourish.

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