EDITOR Jonathan Grudin jgrudin@microsoft.com

happily sold his cars, getting feedback from buyers and money to work on another car. He gave away the first internal combustion engine he built to someone who proposed a use for it. He drove his first car for a thousand miles, “then sold it to Charles Ainsley of Detroit for two hundred dollars. That was my first sale. I had built the car not to sell but only to experiment with. I wanted to start another car. Ainsley wanted to buy. I could use the money and we had no trouble in agreeing upon a price. I built three cars in all in my home shop and all of them ran for years in Detroit.”

The years of mass production of Model Ts with little visible change may seem at odds with iterative design, but between 1892 and the formation of his company in 1903, most of which time he worked for the Edison Illuminating Company, Ford built about 25 cars. The Ford Motor Company then built and sold eight models in the five years preceding the Model T—Models A, B, C, F, K, N, R, and S—and tested prototypes labeled with the 11 missing letters. (Imaginative branding this was not—in fact, Ford was hostile to aesthetic differentiation. He cheerfully announced, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black,” and later observed, “We did not make the pleasure appeal. We never have.”)

Ford summed up his commitment to research: “I do not believe in starting to make until I have discovered the best possible thing. This, of course, does not mean that a product should never be changed, but I think that it will be found more economical in the end not even to try to produce an article until you have fully satisfied yourself that utility, design, and material are the best. If your researches do not give you that confidence, then keep right on searching until you find confi-dence…. I spent twelve years before I had a Model T that suited me. We did not attempt to go into real production until we had a real product.”

Ford’s 1922 autobiography details a carefully constructed philosophy. Most unusual was Ford’s extreme focus on customer experience, rooted in an idealistic worldview based on “service.” He wrote, “Profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It cannot be the basis—it must be the result of service…. The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the large attention given to finance and the small attention to service. That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the

Interactive design: Henry Ford with his first and 10 millionth automobiles (From the collections of The Henry Ford).

money should come as the result of work and not before the work... A dissatisfied customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up the work which ought to have been done correctly in the first place…. Even as late as 1910 and 1911 the owner of an automobile was regarded as essentially a rich man whose money ought to be taken away from him.”

His first product goal was ease of use: “Simplicity—most of the cars at that time required considerable skill in their management… (For example) the simplicity and the ease of control of the transmission….”

He monitored customer experience to an extreme degree. For example, of his first commercial car, the Model A, Ford wrote, “Every one of these has a history. Take No. 420. Colonel D. C. Collier of California bought it in 1904. He used it for a couple of years, sold it, and bought a new Ford. No. 420 changed

May + June 2008