Erin Casali
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2012–2026
3:06 · 2.3M views · Jun 26, 2011
A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997 explaining that focus means saying no to many good ideas. It is a short answer about product strategy and its effect on people.
HN uses it as the canonical source for the 'focus is saying no' quote, cited in threads on product decisions such as dropping old hardware support.
5 comments from Hacker News
That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. [LINK] >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo [LIN
Then there were Apple and IBM's two joint ventures: Taligent and Kaleida (where I worked on ScriptX until it shut down). [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Working at Kaleida was like having parents who couldn't get along and argued all the time, so no hard decisions ever actually got made. ScriptX supported QuickTime on MacOS, Windows and OS/2, but Apple was shy about IBM and other companies having access to the source code. IBM desperately wanted everyone to use and love OS/2 (so they renamed it Warp so the cool kids would dig it), while Taligent was tasked at solving the problem of Apple's shitty operating system. Taligent also had their own weird incompatible object model, as well as CommonPoint's "people, places and things" metaphor, which they shamelessly ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock. [LINK] CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them. I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be. [LINK] And then there was OpenDoc. There were actually two different incompatible implementations of OpenDoc, one from Apple on MacOS and one from IBM on
It isn't like these support issues are a surprise to them, they just have different priorities than fixing them. Exactly! Like I said, I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere. Supporting 6 year old hardware is a very, very low priority, so they didn't spend any resources on it. As SJ himself said, focus is about saying "no". This video discusses OpenDoc, but it could just as easily apply to supporting 6 year old hardware: this video Apple is always pushing forward. Sometimes perhaps a bit too aggressively, but they're always pushing forward.
Funny enough the next suggested play after that video is this one where the article got its headline from, which it credited to Steve jobs in the first paragraph, from WWDC ‘97: this video
Focusing is about saying no. — Steve Jobs this video (WWDC '97) This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.