Chapter 7
“No More Crap Products”
Creating Excellence
We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.
—Steve Jobs
The reason for the outpouring of emotion around the world at the time of Steve’s death was that his products had touched people emotionally. Money and profits were never the motivators for Steve. His motivation was, “I’m going to build a product for myself, a product that will fill a need and at the same time give me pleasure to use.”
A product created from that vision sets the standard for the entire product category. Steve didn’t invent the idea of building products that pleased the creator, any more than Leonardo da Vinci invented portrait painting with the Mona Lisa or carmaker Henry Ford invented the automobile. But Ford’s cars drastically, dramatically, and beneficially changed American society, and that all happened because Ford was able to build reliable cars he could sell inexpensively. Steve, on the other hand, in all the years I knew him, never had inexpensive in his vocabulary.
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