Item — HN Reader

"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.

The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview

2 comments

Or as Parkinson wrote many decades before, injelitance

I've always taken this to heart in looking at how organizations operate, and in broad strokes, not only is was Jobs right, keeping this in the back of my mind has always allowed me to evaluate organizational inertia very quickly.

That said, I wonder, Jobs lived through Apple's transformation, but not its peak phase where Apple was simply printing money year after year after year. I do wonder if Jobs in 2016 would have been able to keep the organization performing at such a high caliber.

Even he seemed like he was making unforced errors at times too, like the "you're holding it wrong" fiasco, but its hard to say since he didn't live through Apple 2013-2019 where it became an ever increasing money printing machine.

In the age of AI, COVID-19 etc. I wonder how jobs post 2020 would treat things.

Jobs would’ve went all-in on Siri. He acquired it and loved it.

I think Jobs would have gotten bored of sitting back, printing money, and manufacturing the same boring rectangles over and over for a decade.