Jul 10, 2013

Steve Jobs - Focusing Is About Saying No

A few words on the importance of "focusing" by the Steve Jobs, Apple founder.

Audience Member
What about OpenDoc?

Steve Jobs
What about OpenDoc? What about it? It's dead right?

I spend a lot of time working on it.

Let me say something that is sort of generic. I know some of you spend a lot of time 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. There were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers, lousy management. What happened was that you look at the farm that has 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.

So we had to decide what are the fundamental directions we are going in and what makes sense and what doesn't. And there were a bunch of things that didn't. Micro-cosmically they might have made sense, macro-cosmically they made no sense. And you know the hardest thing is when you think of focusing, well you think of focusing saying "yes", no. Focusing is about saying no. And you have to say "no, no, no". And when you say "no" you piss off people, and they talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article about you. And it's really a pisser because you want to be nice, you don't want to tell the San Jose Mercury that the person that is telling you this was asked to leave, or this or 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 has been taking them like an adult. And I'm proud of that. And there's more to come, I'm sure. There's more to come I'm sure. I read these articles about some of these people that have left, I know these people. They haven't done anything in 7 years. They leave and it's like "the company is about to fall apart the next day". I think there will be stories like that that come and go. But focusing is about saying no, and the results of that focus is going to be some real great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

I was for putting a bullet to the head on OpenDoc. I thought it was great technology but it didn't fit. The rest of the world is not going to use OpenDoc. I think as a container strategy there's some stuff in the Java space that's much better. Even the OpenDoc guys were trying to rewrite the whole thing in Java anyway, which was a restart so it didn't make sense.

Links: Steve Jobs Wiki, All About Steve Jobs.

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