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A focus on customer value: The birth of the 753 and the alphabet series
After all our trials and challenges, the 700C was ultimately a success and so the ThinkPad Series was born. Both IBM and our group saw vast potential in the notebook PC market, and as a result a tremendous amount of energy was poured into building the ThinkPad business.
For some time after the launch, a single series was developed for the ThinkPad platform, but as notebook PCs carved out a niche for themselves in the business world, the number of users rapidly increased and the needs of customers diversified as well. Usage styles also became increasingly varied, and price perception variations began to emerge. It became necessary to develop a diversified lineup in order to meet the broad range of customer needs. This led to the 500 and the 300 Series following the success of the 700 Series. Collectively, these came to be known as 753.
The 500 Series was launched in May 1996, while the 380 Series was released in May the following year. At the same time, we introduced a platform for each series, replacing the single platform up to that point.
There had actually been an earlier 300 Series, but that was simply a reduced-cost version of the 700 Series. The 380 Series consisted of models that pursued high product quality at a lower range of prices than the 700 Series. The 500 Series meanwhile aimed for an extremely thin body, light weight, and superior portability, employing an external floppy disk drive for this reason. It additionally featured a 12.1-inch liquid crystal display, which was considered large at the time. As a result, this series used a one-spindle platform with only an internal hard disk drive.
The 570 Series that came after the 560 Series added an UltraBase, which is an extension unit that directly connects to the main unit functions that have been subtracted to make it thinner and lighter. Attaching the main unit to this docking device allowed the easy connection of a floppy disk drive, CD-ROM drive, and various other peripheral devices.
Later, the 600 Series, which inherited most of the features of the 700 Series while featuring a thinner and lighter design, was introduced.
In 2000, the lineup was further streamlined and strengthened. The A Series and the T Series came out at the same time. In Japan, these two series were launched in May 2000. In August that year, the X Series was also introduced.
The A Series was an A4-sized all-in-one notebook PC positioned as a successor to the 700 and the 300 Series. The high-performance A Series models that were the successors to the 700 Series had a “P” appended to the product name to distinguish them from the successors to the 300 Series of middle-range models. The R Series of more economical models was added later, in 2001.
The T Series, which consists of A4-sized notebook PCs, is the successor of the 600 Series. The X Series, a series of B5-sized thin and light notebooks, was positioned as the successor of the 500 Series. This in fact came after the 570 Series of A4-size notebooks with a 13.3-inch screen, but as the result of marketing research for the Japanese market, a more compact version B5-sized notebook with a 12.1-inch display became the entry-level model.
At the time, I was often asked about the meaning of these letters, A, T, X, and R. The “A” stands for “Alternative to a desktop computer.” “T” stands for “Thin-and-light notebook.” “X” stands for “eXtra-light, eXtra-small ultraportable.” And “R” stands for “Reliable.”
At the beginning of 2000, the word “traveler” came into fashion. It described a business person who travels around the world with a notebook PC — a market served by ThinkPad’s X and T Series. In Europe and the US, the T Series was synonymous with the traveler’s notebook PC, but in Japan, the X Series was overwhelmingly popular. I think there are three main reasons for these different preferences. First is the carrying style. The Japanese use trains as their basic mode of transportation, whereas Europeans and Americans tend to travel by car, which makes them more tolerant of bigger sizes and particularly, weights. Europeans and Americans use keyboards from a young age, and thus favor a standard-size keyboard, while the Japanese are more flexible about keyboard size and readily adapt to smaller keyboards.
One more reason is the general preference of the Japanese for smaller things (there is even an expression for this, which translates as “light, small, short and thin”), and a view that the smaller a product can be made, the more outstanding its technology. In this regard, Europeans and Americans are the opposite, as they tend to view a small size as referring to inferior functionality. However, the X Series is a B5-sized machine on the road, but when paired with the UltraBay back in the office, it acquires the same ease of use and functionality of an A4-sized machine, a concept that gradually made its way across to European and American users.
Actually, during the initial stages of development in the 1990s, the focus tended to be on how to incorporate leading-edge technologies, which was only natural as these were constantly evolving. It was an engineer-driven age, which might also be described as “industry first.”
However, as this priority was maintained, product variations within the same ThinkPad family became numerous, jeopardizing the brand’s unity. Excessive variations, for example positioning the Power button in completely different locations, meant sacrificing both user friendliness and the commonality of parts. So from 2000, as we were moving on to the second generation, we began aiming to unify usability. Starting with the alphabet series, we sought to unify the user interface and peripheral devices for a friendlier user experience.
Since then, we have been applying and introducing the latest technologies, but even more so, we have sought to deliver genuine customer value, as it would be meaningless just to indulge ourselves as engineers.
What is customer value? Whether a technology is interesting to an engineer is not what matters. What truly matters, and what we sought to promote, is the importance of satisfying and creating value for the customer through the application of the technology.
ThinkPad701C
The ThinkPad 701C, the world’s first notebook PC to feature
a butterfly (foldout) keyboard, announced in 1995
The importance of bringing together the views of marketers and engineers
Marketing is essential for making products that maximize customer value by using the skills of engineers. We have briefly covered the evolution of the ThinkPad under IBM, and I had a hand in shaping its course as well. While close working relations between marketers and engineers are needed, there are also unbridgeable differences between the two, which, given the nature of their roles, is only to be expected. Only by working to overcome such differences can great products be born.
Marketers respond to market demands. They obtain opinions such as “we want such-and-such” from customers, digest this information and pass it on to the engineers. Almost all the elements of such requirements are already present in products that are already available. For example, marketers tend to pick and choose from among features of competitors’ products. This is of course a valuable approach. For engineers, however, it is our nature, even our duty, to bring new and unfamiliar technologies to the market. This is a practice called product-out; the risk here is of releasing a product ahead of its time that ends up failing.
Looking back, we had already developed a tablet PC in 1992 under IBM. Unfortunately, that product was not well accepted at the time. I believe that this was because the groundwork had not been laid, and the environment unprepared. Pen input devices were also launched around 1993. Such devices have finally come into wider use recently. However, back then, such devices were little more than speculative on the part of engineers. Stylus input was at the technological leading edge, so we felt compelled to build it in.
This device was ahead of its time technologically, and although it was covered extensively by the media, users did not take to it. They did not understand how to use it, or what it was for. This was the honest reaction of the market. To us, it was a case of having failed to sufficiently explain the value of the pen input device. Simp
ly launching a device in the market does not mean that its new features will promote themselves on their own. I believe that we have had quite a few such experiences in the past.
What’s important is that engineers and marketers harmonize their views, and work together to develop products in a given direction in a given year, creating a strong portfolio.
We offer end products that directly interface with customers, which allow us to collect the views, complaints, and requests of customers. While we listen closely to these voices, we cannot remain captive to them, and must remember to add our own imagination as creators.
Balancing conflicting needs—an engineer’s never-ending challenge
Once the portfolio design and concept kickoff have been completed, a list of wants and needs, called the MRD (market requirements document), arrives from marketing. The engineers review the list, consider what is, and is not, possible from the development side, and determine the actual functional specifications.
For a notebook PC, this is the toughest stage and this is where the development manager’s skills come in. There is always the need to make the notebook PC as thin and as light as possible. But at the same time, there is the conflicting desire to also cram in many functions. Battery life is also a priority. The list goes on and on.
This gives rise to complications. The use of a harder cover, for example, drives up the cost. There is also the question of the amount of pressure on the cover which will cause it to push against the LCD, which in turn will press against the keyboard. And if we use a particular material for the cover, how many tenths of a millimeter should the gap be, between the LCD and the keyboard, for the product to pass the “torture tests”? That gap must be sufficiently large, but will also make the product thicker. Now we need to decide whether to use a more expensive cover, for a thinner profile.
Some might say to run some simulations but this only reveals an incorrect understanding of what simulations are capable of. No simulation can give a yes or no answer when the data is input. No machine or software can make decisions for you. If one opts for safety, the product will end up being heavy and thick. If, on the other hand, one focuses exclusively on market needs and designs a notebook PC with zero gap between the LCD and the keyboard, things may go well all the way up to the point of no return, when the molds are completed, but in many cases, such a design will end up failing. How does one assess the best approach? Such conflicts are ever-present and perfection is impossible. Materials and technologies meanwhile keep on evolving, making it always possible to further push the envelope, meaning one has to constantly wrestle with such questions to identify the best solution. This requires some experience. Developing such experience is required not only for development managers, but for every engineer involved. It would be impossible to suddenly gather 100 engineers, organize them into teams, and tell them to make a notebook PC from the next day.
One more thing required from engineers is the ability to explain things. Say marketing tells us that a particular item should measure 1-inch. If, at this time, 1.1-inch is the shortest length that can be achieved, the other party will not be convinced if we reply that 1-inch is impossible. Only a length of 1.1-inch can be achieved.” The reason for this needs to be thoroughly explained to the other party’s satisfaction. This is the most important point when working together to fine-tune a design, and engineers must be able to give clear and to-the-point presentations and explanations.
The same applies to development proposals. Proposals that only cover a favored method don’t work. You need to make it clear why a proposed method is the better one by covering all conceivable cases and explaining their respective merits and demerits. Simply saying “This is what I’d like you to allow me to do,” only raises questions, such as, “Is this the only method? Is it the best?” This methodology can be applied far more broadly than just getting one’s proposals approved. Highlighting the process you consider to be the best by reviewing many different methods and cases is more important than anything else.
The relentless pursuit of speed: PCs are not commodities
Notebook PCs are expected to have many different functions, and this is certainly true for the ThinkPad. The most important among them, we believe, is speed. This refers to processing speed, of course, but also to speed of communication.
Over the 18 years that I’ve been involved in the development of ThinkPads, I’ve heard it said many times that “it’s already fast enough.” And every time I’ve thought, “No, it isn’t.”
A wider array of functions is required for users to use their computer more naturally. This means pushing the CPU to its limits. So I have always maintained that ceasing to pursue higher speeds for CPUs and communication devices would stop the progress of the industry.
Even now, I still hear people say that sufficient speed has now been attained. They say things like “We now have enough speed, please make the products thinner and lighter.” Definitely, making notebook PCs thinner and lighter is important, but if we stop pursuing even higher speeds, PCs will have no future. It is true that today’s PCs rarely make us wait for a long time while processing a standalone configuration. They respond immediately in such cases. But what about the speed of communication with the outside? When viewing a website, the screen does not change instantly to another screen when we switch websites. When such switching is slow, we might be kept waiting for as long as 10 or 15 seconds. Does this mean that we can take care of some other task in the meantime? Usually, the answer is no so we have no choice but to wait. Multiplied across many instances throughout a day, the time losses can be substantial, from several minutes to several tens of minutes each day.
I believe in speed. For this reason, I think that PCs must become much faster than they are now. To achieve this, there still are many things that we engineers need to do, including the areas of cooling and total battery management. I absolutely do not believe that today’s computers have become just another mature commodity.
In the world of marketing, many products are said to have become commoditized, meaning a category of products that are common and undifferentiated, opening up widespread price competition.
Unfortunately, personal computers including notebook PCs, are often said to be a commodity, both in Japan and abroad. But engineers still have plenty to do so personal computers cannot be said to be a commodity, as there is still ample room for evolution.
People who claim that personal computers are a commodity may be saying that whatever machine one uses, it all comes out the same. But if we follow this logic, the things that can be done with such commoditized PCs might well be no more than commodity-level tasks. If one’s work is a commodity, the functions required of a PC are few, and the speed and capacity requirements need not be that high.
In truth, the use of a differentiated machine should enhance work efficiency or allow one to work more effectively, thus raising productivity. And in that case, neither the PC nor the work can be called commodities.
