Multimedia

Steve Jobs : Focusing is about saying no.



The transcript:

What about OpenDoc?
What about OpenDoc?
Yeah
What about it?
It’s dead right? It’s dead right?
Yeah
Well… you know… let me say something
as this is sort of generic.
I know some of you spent a lot of time working
on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of.
I apologize.
I feel your pain but
Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management
I have to say it and there were people that were going off in eighteen
different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them.
Good engineers. Lousy management. And what happened was you look at the farm that’s
been created with all these different animals going in different directions
and it doesn’t add up the total is less than the sum of the parts.
And so we had to decide
what are the fundamental directions we’re going in and what makes
sense and what doesn’t and there were a bunch of things that didn’t and
microcosmically they might have made sense macrocosmically they made no sense.
And you know the hardest thing is… when you think about focusing right? You think
well focusing is is saying yes! No.
Focusing… is about saying no.
Focusing is about saying no.
and you’ve got to say no no no no and you say no you piss off
people and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article
about you. You know? And it’s really a pisser because you want to be nice you
don’t want to tell the San Jose Mercury the person is telling you this you know
just was asked to leave or this or that is that so you take the lumps and Apple
has been taking their share of lumps for the last six months in a very unfair way
and it’s been taking them you know? …like an adult and I’m proud of that
and there’s more to come I’m sure. There’s more coming. Some of these I
read these articles about some of these people that have left I know some of
these people, they have done it in seven years and you know they leave and
it’s like you know it it’s like the company’s going to fall apart the next
day and and so you know I think there’ll be stories like that they come and go
but focus is about saying no and the result of that focus is going to be some
really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.
And OpenDoc… I mean I was for putting a bullet in the head of OpenDoc…
A- I didn’t think is great technology but B- it didn’t fit the rest of the world
isn’t going to use OpenDoc and I think as a container strategy there’s some
stuff in the Java space that’s much better
and even the OpenDoc guys were basically trying to rewrite the whole
thing in Java anyway and which was a restart so… it didn’t make sense.

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Abdallah Alaili

I'm a serial entrepreneur (mostly tech) and micro-investor (tiny), this is a blog to learn from other entrepreneurs and spread the wisdom to many more. You can find me on: Instagram - Twitter - Linkedin - more about me