I have an opinion

Herbert Dow founded Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan when he invented a way to produce bromine cheaply. He sold the chemical for industrial purposes all over the US for 36 cents per pound at the turn of the 20th century. He couldn’t go overseas, however, because the international market was controlled by a giant German chemical cartel that sold it at a fixed price of 49 cents per pound. It was understood that the Germans would stay out of the US market so long as Dow and the other American suppliers stayed within its borders.

Eventually Dow’s business was in trouble and he had to expand. He took his bromine to England and easily beat the cartel’s fixed price of 49 cents per pound. Things were okay for a while until a German visitor came to Michigan and threatened Dow that he had to cease and desist. Dow didn’t like being told what to do and told the cartel to get lost.

Shortly thereafter German bromine started appearing for sale in the US for 15 cents per pound, way below Dow’s price. The cartel flooded the US market, offering the chemical way below their own costs, intending to drive Dow out of business. But Dow outsmarted them. He stopped selling in the US market entirely and instead arranged for someone to secretly start buying up all the German bromine he could get his hands on. Dow repackaged it as his own product, shipped it to Europe, and made it widely available (even in Germany) at 27 cents per pound. The Germans were wondering 1) why wasn’t Dow out of business and 2) why was there suddenly such demand for bromine in the US??

The cartel lowered its price to 12 cents and then 10 cents. Dow just kept buying more and more, gaining huge market share in Europe. Finally the Germans caught on and had to lower their prices at home. Dow had broken the German chemical monopoly and expanded his business greatly. And customers got a wider range of places to buy bromine at lower prices.

Dow went on to do the same trick to the German dye and magnesium monopolies. This is now the textbook way to deal with predatory price cutting.

“I think the the biggest mistake people make is latching onto the first idea that comes to them and trying to do that. It really comes to a thing that my folks taught me about money. Don’t buy something unless you’ve wanted it three times. Similarly, don’t throw in a feature when you first think of it. Think if there’s a way to generalize it, think if it should be generalized. Sometimes you can generalize things too much. I think like the things in Scheme were generalized too much. There is a level of abstraction beyond which people don’t want to go. Take a good look at what you want to do, and try to come up with the long-term lazy way, not the short-term lazy way.”

— Larry Wall

Customer insight has to anticipate what customers will want, even when they don’t know it themselves.
Unfortunately, you can’t figure this out by asking them; they just don’t know.

First, rather than focusing narrowly on products and their attributes, you have to look at the whole of the customer experience, what customers are doing before, during and after they use the product, and the contexts within which they use it.

Second, because you can’t ask them, you have to observe them empathically and interpret their actions.

A summary of events that went down between Apple and myself over the last few days that has led to my disappointment in Apple: 
8/23-> Purchase a rMBP
8/30-> Receive rMBP a day early (+1 for apple) 
8/30-> After a day of use notice the battery life is horrible (call apple and they tell me to do a SMC reset) 
9/2-> Take rMBP into apple only to have them tell me there is nothing wrong (reading forms

 at this point to realize Mountain Lion OS maybe the issue and Apple needs to issue a fix) 
9/5 Decided I need more than 3.5 hours of battery life when paying 3 times the cost of a normal PC. So returned the rMBP and purchased a fully loaded Macbook air. 
Here is where the fun starts: 
9/5-> Load the Time Machine on to the new AIR only to find that it has Lion. And my time machine back up is from ML (Different OS’s). This causes a cluster f**Kand everything is totally messed up at this point. My contacts are not showing up, its looking for apps that are not there, and not allowing me to open certain system preferences. At this point I say no biggie and read up how to install certain patches to fix there issues. Only issue is: THESE PATCHES WONT INSTALL on the SSD flash cause it has a weird combo of ML and Lion cluster F**K! 
9/5 -> Email Tim Cook directly in frustration as I should have been told it is Lion and not ML before porting over.
9/6 -> Get a phone call and email from Tim Cook’s office. This gets me excited hoping there is a resolution other than exchanging the macbook air hoping that the new one will have ML.
9/7 -> Tim cook’s office says: Please just upgrade to ML and gives me a link to the site (Felt very let down by this as I could have done this myself). 
9/7 ->Go into Apple to exchange the Air for another Air with ML and only to find that NONE of the Air at one of the busiest apple stores in the country have ML installed! 
9/7 -> As I been through hell and back with the air and spent almost 4 hours at this point trying to fix it, I ask the apple rep if they could install ML on it while I go to a few meetings and come back 5 hours later.
This is where the total Apple Experience just goes to shit and leaves me annoyed, angry and frustrated. 
9/7 -> I return 5 hours later to pick up the Air, and they could NOT find the air for about 30 minutes. Then they boot the air up only to find that ML has NOT been installed and I have lost 5 hours and countless trips to the Apple store. They try to see what the resolution is only to tell me: We can upgrade ML and port the Time machine over (Something I can do myself). At this point this makes me furious as I was never told the first Air had Lion, never told about issues porting ML time machine backup to a Lion. Now saying they would do the upgrade and NOT doing it and not letting me know they wont do it. 

As a result of this I truly felt Apple had let the customer down in terms of experience, transparency and most importantly trust. Hence my frustration. 

I will be emailing Tim Cook all this today hoping that they realize to place the OSX version on the box of the Air’s so people do not go through the trouble I have gone through. It may seem minute but when you pay for a premium experience you expect premium service.