Steve Wozniak’s Biggest Mistake
We are big fans of Woz, one of the world’s greatest engineers. But even the greats make mistakes—that’s how we learn.
This is the CORE Remote Control. Back in 1987 Wozniak left Apple and started a company called Cloud 9. CORE was the world’s first programmable remote control, and it could record codes from other remotes. Neither of those features were available from competitive products for several years.
Geeks rejoice: It had a hidden serial port on the back to talk to your PC, and the bottom panel slid down to reveal a couple dozen programming buttons.
Who was the Target Customer?
Let’s look at the manual to see how they described the product (yes, we have both the product and the manual at SalesDev.Global):
Based on the features described in the manual above, the CORE was aimed at customers who wanted and could use:
The ability to learn from other remote controls
Two custom microprocessors
The ability to program sequences…in machine code
A timer running 24/7/365…on battery power
A replaceable IR transmitter (plugged into an addressable RS232 interface)
Remember, the CORE was introduced in 1987, when a lot fewer people were hacking microprocessors than today. Here’s how to program a volume change:
Ummm…What?
While we can praise the power of the programming language and the elegance of the learning function, it’s evident that this product was not aimed at consumers. The target market was was machine code hackers in homes with multiple remote controls. If you think this was a small market in 1987, you’re right. But the CORE failed for an even more basic reason.
Why Did CORE Fail?
Woz and his team assumed that customers would want to learn from existing remotes and program a lot of custom functions. But universal remotes had been introduced a couple of years earlier and were starting to sell briskly by the time the CORE was launched. By 1987, when you asked universal remote buyers why they purchased, virtually all gave one answer:
“I lost my TV remote control.”
This means there is no original remote to “learn” from. Universal remotes include preprogrammed codes that work with most TVs. The CORE couldn’t satisfy these customers. Even today, preprogrammed universal remotes far outsell programmable and learning remotes.
What Could Woz Have Done Differently?
Woz was ahead of the industry by 5-10 years, which means market validation is tricky. But if he would have explored customers’ attitudes about remote controls, and tested their desire for replacing lost remotes as well as learning and programming functions, he might have developed a different product. The CORE was cool and powerful, but didn’t sell.