The Science of Successful Things: Star Wars, Steve Jobs, and Google’s Epic Fail | Derek Thompson

The Science of Successful Things: Star Wars, Steve Jobs, and Google’s Epic Fail
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So, how do you make a product successful? You make it out of something old. The Atlantic editor Derek Thompson gives a more studious explanation of this answer as he poses the question: why did Google Glass fail and why is the iPhone the most profitable product in human history? Poor design comes to mind, but the answer, Thompson suggests, is much deeper than that. Both were wild new inventions, but Google Glass ultimately failed because it looked like a prototype and not at all like any product that consumers had ever seen before. It seemed alien, and that was a bad thing. Butt the iPhone, on the other hand, is merely a design update of the iPod. Consumers already understood how to work it before they even picked it up, and therefore buyers already knew what they were in for. It's this familiarity itself that is the selling point, as this logic applies to the world of storytelling, too. Derek explains the "hero journey" similarities between Star Wars, The Odyssey, and... The Bible. Derek Thompson's latest book is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.
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DEREK THOMPSON:

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, where he writes about economics and the media. He is a regular contributor to NPR's Here and Now and appears frequently on television, including CBS and MSNBC. He was named to both Inc. magazine’s and Forbes’s 30 Under 30 lists. He lives in New York City.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Thompson: My book Hit Makers is essentially about the science of why we like what we like. And one of the most interesting answers to that question is MAYA, most advanced yet acceptable. And this was of the theory of everything by Raymond Loewy the father of industrial design in America. And a lot of people today don’t know who Raymond Lowey is, but this is a guy who was essentially kind of like Steve Jobs meets Don Draper from the 1950s. He invented or designed the first…

He designed the most famous car design in the 20th century the 1950 Studebaker, the modern train, the modern greyhound bus, the modern tractor, even that pencil sharpener that looks like an egg that was his design. And in thinking about this question how could one person understand what consumers want from things as different as cars and pencil sharpeners his answer was this, MAYA, most advanced yet acceptable. People are torn between neophilia on the one hand, they like new things, and neophobia on the other hand, they’re afraid of anything that’s too new. And he was this genius essentially of combining familiarity and surprise. 

I think the most useful way to think about the MAYA principle is to think of it as to sell something familiar make it surprising, but to sell something surprising make it familiar. 

Let’s take an example like Star Wars. George Lucas was working on Star Wars for a long, long time. The script was absolutely terrible. He was sharing it with his best friends like Francis Ford Coppola and they were all telling him that the script was absolute garbage. And he had essentially built this incredibly surprising novel new world filled with Jedis and forces and magic and creatures that no one had seen before. And then he was reading this book by Joseph Campbell on the mono myth, on this idea that every great story in human history has essentially been the same story of an ordinary person who goes on an extraordinary journey, defeats a nemesis intimately involved in his own origin story and then comes back to the real world as the hero. And so he said this is it this is the story that explains that is Jesus, that is Buddha, that is the Odyssey and the Iliad, I’ll take this incredibly familiar structure and I’ll put it into this incredibly surprising world building exercise and that is Star Wars, it essentially sales an incredibly surprising world in an incredibly familiar narrative setting. And I think that’s one reason why we like it. It’s not so much that it’s novel, it’s that it’s a novel setting that is essentially telling the oldest story known to man.

So it matters where you are starting. If you’re starting with an incredibly familiar product or a really familiar intellectual property—like say, movies—and creating a movie sequel, the challenge for those writers is how do we create a surprising new story that will get people back to a familiar character? 

But lots of people are dealing..

[Yusuf]

Overall premise is fine, but a few issues with his examples:

-- The iPod Touch came out after the iPhone. The IPhone seemed really new and cool at the time. (but yes it was just adapting familiar tech, like the Blackberry had been using touch screen, but with a stylus, so that probably would have been a better example). edit: Or did he just mean the scroll wheel on the iPod?

-- The "ordinary person becomes a hero" trope is mostly a modern story, because we now lie in a society without kings and alpha male apes in the way we used to. The oldest story ever told is the hero whose starting point is from royalty and status and power already of some sort. All the examples he listed did NOT match what he claimed. Jesus was the literal son of God, and had lineage from kings. Buddha was a prince. Take most others - Perseus and Hercules were demigods. Arjuna and his brothers were princes and warriors. Krishna and avatars are all gods (or God himself, depending on how you phrase it). The list goes on. But the overall arc of becoming even a greater hero vs a big bad enemy etc of course is indeed the same in Star Wars.

[flyingmobias]

That explanation begs the question: how did folks become familiar with the iPod? If you use vague qualitative terms you can succeed in journalism and even some academia but it doesn't mean there's much substance... Science is about controlled, accurate, precise tests...

[JoryBlake]

Wow, I got a ton of great info from this quick video...thanks !

[ucasvb]

This sort of "entrepreneurship worship" is the worst. In a society where marketing and general cultural manipulation exists on a large scale, things are not "successful" (as defined by the number of people who engage with it) because they are in any way better, but simply because they are popular (people want that particular thing to engage with). Nothing more, nothing less. Any attempt to attribute any sort of overarching merit to that achievement beyond marketing is nonsense.

A new amazing brand of cola could be invented today and by sheer marketing and familiarity alone it would be unable to compete with Coke and Pepsi.

He mentions this relationship over and over, but fails to understand that doesn't mean anything with respect to the product or idea. The conflation of success, quality, adequacy, satisfaction with mere artificially-produced popularity is unacceptable in this type of discussion.

[tintucnongnhat]

Hey professor, please make video to answer me this question i cannot get my head around: why the C constant is constant or why the speed of light invariance is true. Why speed of light is independent with movement of speed of source (like you hold a flashlight and you move) why speed of light always the same, constant and not plus speed of source?? this is truly a question that i am begging you to explain. thanks

[ctcboater]

Raymond Loewy wasn't a technology designer, he was a stylist. Most of his products were facades of a fake future. Compare Alex Issigonis's work to his and it's not a contest.

[bits]

Steve Jobs was a salesman
Nikola Tesla was a fucking Genius

[danbee]

An understandable concept, yet as a younger gamer, I knew Apple was expensive, slow, and too much glamour(the computer had a handle on the top???).
These were generational roll outs that inevitably gains you success over an extended period of time. Ive been on an Iphone since my first hand me down 3GS.
Second, utilization should mean everything. Google glass, what the hell
will a CONSUMER use that for? The need for such tech is null, and thats where wasteful spending becomes part of the budget either way. If an idea performs poorly, it should/could be directed to different commodities. Cops could have used glass during the push for recording confrontations.

[Pandamasque]

Which is why I always considered Star Wars a fantasy series, not a sci-fi. * hides *

[CarFreeSegnitz]

Incremental improvements. Take anything and add one little feature at a time and resell it. This has been practiced in the automotive industry since forever.

Apple will fail soon. It's one company that tries one feature upgrade to their main product line. A few stumbles like the blue-tooth earphones and they could lose their currently captive audience. Android phones are wildly more likely to succeed because dozens of manufacturers are trying new features on their devices all at the same time. Amazon is poised to shatter branding by exposing the lie that a brand name guarrantees you quality. Apple will be exposed as just one brand of manufacturer who is charging waaay too much just because of their name.

[GamersBar]

Polish and perception are important things, steve spent years making people associate quality and polish with the apple brand, not that it matters now because a few years of laptops that don't need passwords can make that perception die pretty quick

[PavlosPapageorgiou]

This video would be better if you knew what you were talking about. iPhone was released in June 2007 and iPod touch later in September. The other release order would have been obviously disastrous.

Google Glass failed not because it looked weird but because it facilitated recording every social interaction, which is a huge social norms mistake but it isn't an illustration of the MAYA principle.

[Wagmiman]

The thing is that when something new doesn't work very well or isn't practical, you can try to save it by making it feel familiar.

[Iceport]

The concept is thought provocative but the familiarity between iPhone and iPod by design was a stretch in my opinion. Apple could have made iPhone look like a Nokia or Motorola if they were really looking for the familiarity in the phone category. There is no doubt that iPhone has one of the greatest design in the history of modern technology, but certainly not because of the resemblance to an iPod discussed in this video. In fact, it did not feel like an iPod at all other than its minimalistic rectangular shape, which really has not much to do with the phone’s rich user experience. The “familiarity” instead is something more fundamental, an experience so familiar to human nature and so intuitive that even a baby knows how to swipe and find what he needs.

[emancoy]

Google Glass should have been marketed with Dragon Ball Z
"ITS OVER 9, 000!!!!"
At least it would be familiar worldwide.

[Kodachrome]

Raymond Lowey's most famous design, still used today is the Coca-Cola bottle.

[vedxgaming]

Maya is like a Code used by Creator to stop his A.I.(I.e. we humans) to become god

[jephroxy]

The only real takeaway was the MAYA concept. Which, sure is a great concept for the framework, but can only take you so far. If the rest of the work put into abusiness or property is trash than it doessnt matter if the framework is tremendous

[LeonidasGGG]

I feel that every video now on Youtube has (somehow) "Star Wars" in it.

[mikalrain]

Nonsense. Confirmation bias (cherry-picking evidence looking backwards) and narrative fallacy (seeing patterns where there may be none).
We can argue both ways by choosing what "explanation" to focus on: TV had no familiar technological "sibling" (disproves the familiar-logic); TV was just the next step from the familiar storytelling (confirms logic).