Dell: "Big Ears" for customers

Michael Dell: How I Became an Entrepreneur Again | Inc.com:

"Have Big Ears 

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem,
because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000.
So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development.

That can mean anything from a new feature or capability to a new way to finance purchases or a new way to link things together. Invariably, those solutions come not from guys sitting in a room by themselves saying, "Hmm; what would I want if I were a customer?" or, "What are our competitors doing?" They come from actual customers."