John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

QUOTED

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs


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The best and brightest are usually put to work on optimisation. … They will then go forward and solve the inefficiencies, and that’s where 99% of most energy is spent on. But, at some point you run out of room to improve things, and that’s when you have to step aside and ask, can we make it different?

— Horace Dediu, in a podcast interview with William Channer