If you had listened to Steven P. Jobs' presentations over the years, he came across not as the creator of a product so much as its very first fan--the first person to digest its possibilities.
Before his hiatus from Apple, in 1985, his entrepreneurial meddling and micromanagement had gotten out of control. But the years away reportedly helped him develop his leadership style and begin ceding more responsibilities to others.
He became less enamored of tech for tech's sake. He blossomed into a user-experience savant. A reporter who asked Jobs about the market research that went into the iPad was famously told, "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."
Henry Ford once said, "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
It's not that Jobs didn't think like a consumer--he just thought like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past. He was a focus group of one, the ideal Apple customer, two years out. As he told Inc. magazine in 1989, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
Perhaps, Jobs was the greatest user of technology to ever live....
Source: FastCompany, October 2011