Translate the User, Not Just the Words

——The Third Act of the Technological Revolution Trilogy

“If you ask the customer what they want, they will say: a faster horse.” This quote, often attributed to Henry Ford, is often used to argue that “you don’t need to listen to the customer.” This is a gross misinterpretation. The true meaning is: the customer is always right, but what they express are symptoms. The entrepreneur’s job is to diagnose the cause, and then use new technology to prescribe a solution that the customer could never imagine. When customers want “a faster horse,” the cause is “getting from A to B more quickly,” and the prescription is the internal combustion engine. Ignoring the customer is a dead end, as is only listening to the surface level — the only way forward is to translate.

The Same Mistake, Unchanged for Ninety Years

In 1876, Western Union rejected the telephone. Bell’s patent was offered to Western Union at a very low price, and its internal assessment concluded that this was an “electrical toy”: it could not transmit formal telegrams, left no written record, and had only a short range. By every standard of telegraphy, the telephone was inadequate. But the underlying customer need was never “telegrams”; it was “long-distance communication”—and by that standard, the telephone crushed the telegraph. Western Union was not blind to the technology. It was trapped by its own terminology: having defined itself as a “telegraph company,” it used the specifications of the existing solution to reject the next generation of solutions.

In the 1960s, AT&T rejected the internet. Engineer Paul Baran brought packet switching—the technical foundation of the future internet—to AT&T and was rejected outright. In the worldview of circuit switching, cutting information into packets and letting each find its own route was heresy. The telephone company that had risen by disrupting Western Union now rejected, in exactly the same posture, the thing that would disrupt it. The two cases were ninety years apart; the mistake was unchanged word for word. Theodore Levitt gave the disease a name in 1960: “marketing myopia.” Railroads declined not because demand for transportation disappeared—it kept growing—but because, when asked “Who are we?”, they answered “a railroad company” rather than “a transportation company.” When automobiles and airplanes began taking that demand, the railroads did not even see it as their battlefield.

The Military Version of the Terminological Dilemma: The Funeral of the Cavalry

Defining yourself by your solutions in business means losing market value; in military terms, the cost is measured in national fortune.

By the late nineteenth century, machine guns had repeatedly demonstrated the conclusion on colonial battlefields. At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, British troops equipped with Maxim guns routed tens of thousands of Sudanese troops in a single morning while suffering fewer than one percent of their opponents’ casualties. A few years later, the Russo-Japanese War repeated the conclusion between two modern armies. The reports reached every general staff in Europe—and the cavalry officer corps remained almost entirely unmoved.

They weren’t blind to the reports; they were unable to translate “cavalry” back to its mission. Cavalry’s mission was mobility, shock, and reconnaissance; the horse was simply the best solution at the time. But in the officers’ corps, the horse was no longer a solution — horsemanship was the language of the aristocracy, cavalry was the pinnacle of the military branch, and the horse was an identity itself. To get off the horse was not to change equipment, but to cancel an entire class’s raison d’être. Western Union, by defining itself as a “telegraph company,” lost a business; by defining itself as “horse riders,” the cost was paid in the next war.

The machine guns and trenches of World War I gave the first verdict. After the verdict, another opportunity for translation came: tanks and airplanes took over the mission of “mobility, shock, and reconnaissance” — the solution changed, but the mission remained unchanged. The United Kingdom, which invented the tank, let the armored corps be slowly ground down by military politics and budgets; while Germany, deprived of all its old armaments by the Treaty of Versailles — precisely because it had no old assets to be loyal to — designed armored divisions from scratch. In May 1940, the Battle of France was decided in six weeks. France had tanks, but lacked the organization to use them as “new cavalry” rather than “infantry’s appendage” — a systemic killing of such translators by the organization (see “The Funeral of the Battleship” for more on why organizations systematically kill such translators).

The cavalry officers did not lose to tanks, but to a translation question: they were loyal to the horse, while the mission was loyal to speed.

Kodak: The Best Translation and the Costliest Refusal

Kodak’s greatness began with a perfect translation. In the late 19th century, photography was a craft requiring darkrooms and chemistry knowledge. Eastman saw the essence: what users wanted was not the chemistry, but the memory. So came the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” A single sentence translated photography from a chemist’s craft into everyone’s instinct.

Translation made Kodak, and refusal to translate unmade it. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera. Management’s response was: “Interesting—but don’t tell anyone outside.” For the next three decades, Kodak was not unable to see digitization—it held a vast portfolio of digital patents—but it could not bring itself to attack its own profit pool: film. It forgot that its foundation was “memory” and became loyal to one particular carrier of memory. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. That same year, thirteen-person Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion. What Instagram did was precisely the digital version of “You press the button, we do the rest.” Kodak was killed not by technological blindness, but by identity: it was loyal to its own solution rather than the user’s need.

The Friction Tax: The Countdown Hidden in the Profit Statement

In 2000, Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for $50 million. At the time, customer complaints centered on two points: “new releases are always unavailable” and “late fees are brutal.” Blockbuster’s response was to stock more copies and optimize its stores—to whip the carriage harder. But the underlying customer need was “to watch what I want with zero friction,” while Blockbuster earned hundreds of millions of dollars a year precisely from late fees. Its fattest profit pool was a tax on the user’s unmet need. Every such “friction tax” has one common feature: it marks the disruptor’s line of attack with precision. Netflix’s subscription model, elimination of late fees, and streaming each cut directly into that tax. Banks’ interbank fees, telecom operators’ roaming charges, and intermediaries’ information markups—money earned from a user’s “pain” comes with its own countdown.

Positive Examples of Translation: Listening to Needs, Not Surveys

Walkman. The market research at the time of the project’s launch was uniformly pessimistic: “Who would buy a tape recorder that cannot record?” Akio Morita’s translation was that users did not want a complete set of functions in the product category called a “tape recorder”; they wanted to “carry music with them.” He bet on the need, not the survey, and sold 400 million units. Steve Jobs later stated the same position more bluntly: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That line, too, is often misread as arrogance. In fact, it means the same thing as Ford’s: users’ experience of their needs is always real, while their imagination of solutions is always limited. Listen to the former one hundred percent; do not listen to the latter.

Christensen’s milkshake. A fast-food restaurant wanted to improve its milkshakes. It researched customer demographics and changed the recipe according to flavor preferences, but sales did not move. Christensen’s team changed the question: “What job does the customer ‘hire’ this milkshake to do?” Field observation found that half the milkshakes were sold to solo commuters in the morning. They hired the milkshake to get them through a long, boring drive: it could be held in one hand, lasted a long time, and kept hunger at bay. Its competitors were not other milkshakes at all, but bananas, bagels, and boredom itself. Once the “job” was translated, the direction of improvement was obvious: make it thicker, add pieces of fruit, and make pickup as quick as swipe-and-go. Listen to what users say, but ask not “What do you want?” Ask “What are you hiring it to do?”

The mirror-image failure was Xerox PARC. Graphical interfaces, Ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming—PARC invented almost the entire personal-computing era. But Xerox defined itself as a copier company, so these inventions all looked like “strange things unrelated to the core business.” What happened after Jobs visited PARC in 1979 is well known. Invention does not require the ability to translate; commercialization does. A brilliant laboratory plus a company that refuses to translate equals doing the work for someone else’s benefit.

The Methodology of Translation: Three Actions

First, define yourself with a demand verb, not a solution noun. Railways → transportation, film → memory, telegraph → communication, newspapers → informing people of what is happening. Test this: remove all the product nouns from your company’s self-introduction, and see if the remaining words still explain your existence. If not, it means you are loyal to the solution, and solutions have a limited lifespan.

Second, treat complaints and workarounds as gold. A user’s complaint is the untranslated original text of a need; a user’s hack—managing inventory in Excel, working through WeChat groups, or photographing a manual and sending it to customer service—is a rough prescription they have drafted themselves. The most valuable research is not a survey, but field observation: watch what users actually “hire” your product to do, and where they grit their teeth and endure.

Third, audit your friction tax. Open the income statement and ask of each line: did I earn this money by creating value for the user, or because the user temporarily has no other choice? Every dollar of the latter is a signpost for a disruptor. Cutting your own friction tax is one of the most counterintuitive moves in business—Netflix used streaming to kill its own DVD business—but history’s verdict is consistent: if you do not wield the knife, someone else will do it for you.

For the Age of Compute

What will today’s users ask you for? “A faster chatbot.” “Write my weekly report automatically.” “Replace customer service with AI to save money.” These are the “faster horses” of this era—every sentence true, and every sentence a symptom. The work of translation has only begun. If the “job” for which a weekly report is hired is to reassure superiors and align information, then when intelligence is nearly free, should the report be written faster—or should reassurance and alignment happen in an entirely different way? Which revenues in your industry are, in essence, taxes on the user’s cognitive burden? That is where the next Netflix is sharpening its knife.

The second half of Ford’s line was never “Don’t listen to users.” It was: take every word a user says seriously, but do not take it literally. For more than a century, pitifully few people have managed this—because literal meaning can be heard with the ears, while underlying need can be heard only with the judgment on which you stake your entire fortune.