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3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2024
5:50 · 106K views · Apr 23, 2020
A six-minute excerpt from Steve Jobs' 1995 Lost Interview on why a great idea does not automatically become a great product. He says ideas change substantially once you actually build them.
Quoted in threads on engineering and product building to argue that execution matters more than ideas.
3 comments from Hacker News
I have found that one common element in the things I want to build or fix is that I am opinionated about that thing. I am going to claim that having opinions is a prerequisite to being motivated to shape the world to suit my opinions a little better. If I think about everything that I don't have an opinion about, it's things that I don't understand very well. For example, car washes. I do not care what a car wash tunnel has, if it is brushless or not, if it uses some fancy shampoo or not - I have zero opinions. I can never find motivation to want to go redesign it, fix it or develop software for it. But something like Github's pull request review? Oh boy. It's absolutely insane that you can not comment on an unchanged line in a file you are reviewing. If someone changes a function call 3 out of 4 places, and you want to leave a comment on that unchanged line of code saying "Hey, you forgot to change this too" - guess what? You can't. In my opinion, this is insanely moronic. An opinion like this can easily motivate one to want to go fix a thing or build a thing. (I don't want to solve this problem for other reasons, but that's unrelated to this discussion). How do you form opinions? I don't know, but my guess is that listening to opinionated people with good taste really helps. Dan Norman's book "The Design of everyday things" [0] is one example of a very opinionated work. Bryan Cantrill of Oxide is also often very opinionated on system design, and his podcasts and talks are r
I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything. I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices. It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today. Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2]. [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
I have a lot to say about this sort of X was done in 5 minutes, but I am going to refer to the person who said it best: this video (Steve Jobs on how ideas change when you actually do it)