Pick Watermelons, Not Sesame Seeds: Yahoo and Apple

Wu Jun: “Pick watermelons, not sesame seeds.” When someone devotes all their attention to picking up sesame seeds, they forever lose the possibility of picking watermelons. Yahoo, once a shining name in internet history, took only ten years to go from the world’s leading internet company to being sold. In the broader environment, it was unlucky to encounter stronger companies such as Google and Facebook. But its habit of picking sesame seeds in its product portfolio also hurt it. Yahoo developed countless internet services. Before using its products, users had to search for their web addresses. Yet among all those products, hardly any was number one in the world. Many product lines had very limited traffic and earning power, contributing only tiny sesame seeds. Even added together, they brought in less revenue than a single Google product. Every market has many companies like Yahoo. They see someone making money in a field and want to enter it too, only to end up with a sesame-seed-sized market share that is not worth the effort. Rather than doing this, they would be better off making the most of their own strengths. Apple’s product lines can be counted on one hand, yet it is the company that makes the most money in the world—because it is picking watermelons. People who pick watermelons think very differently from those who pick sesame seeds. They are not tempted by tiny gains; they take a longer view. When Jobs returned to Apple, he found a great many projects and products that were merely sesame seeds. He crossed them out one by one until only a single-digit number of products remained, then turned each into a watermelon. That was how he brought Apple back to life. There are many people picking sesame seeds in the world and few picking watermelons. If you dedicate yourself to watermelons, you must be able to tolerate solitude. Some people say, “But I have never come across a watermelon.” In reality, it is not that you have never encountered one. You see nothing but sesame seeds and spend every day gathering them, leaving no opportunity to develop the ability to pick watermelons. #吳軍見識 [Wu Jun’s Insights]