Executing Better By Listening To Public Discontent

In the wake of the closure of Apple's autonomous car division (Project Titan) this week, one questions if Steve Jobs' axiom still holds true. "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do," declared Jobs and continued with an analogy, "I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'a faster horse!'" Titan joins a growing graveyard of autonomous innovations, which is filled with the tombstones of Baxter, Jibo, Kuri and many broken quadcopters. If anything holds true, not every founder is Steve Jobs or Henry Ford and listening to public sentiment could be a bellwether for success. Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley announced on January 9, 2019 from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) floor, "It's official. It's the timing… the telemetry of adoption for L5 cars without safety drivers expected by many investors may be too aggressive by a decade… possibly decades."