Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think with Apple at least, it’s a sense of trusting the platform to make all the right decisions for you; it’s what you pay for in part. That also leads to the interesting problem of users feeling betrayed instead of just annoyed when something isn’t right. I ran a user feedback tool for help documentation when I was at apple, but people would just post whatever there greivences were about the product and not the d…
> there was immense trust, and lifestyle invested in the brand, and immense pressure as an engineer to live up to all these people’s expectations. Agreed, and this emotional involvement goes a long way to explaining Apple's legendary margins and ability to sell upgrades with increasingly unexciting advancements. > On the ground floor, we weren’t worried about missing earnings or slowing user growth, we were worried t…
I can assure you it absolutely was in my experience. The problem is that there are so many of these issues and so much pressure to release new features that delight users that Apple has scaling pains.
It’s also possible that the C-Suite doesn’t think like that at all, as a grunt I had no insight into their actual motives. But I assumed the values they told us to uphold were genuine. It’s just really hard.
To this point, I’ll mention a talk Ive gave to new interns where he outlined the (then) controversy over the headphone design (the wired ones that come with your phone and slide into the ear). He was tasked with one earbud design, and for some people with different ears it just didn’t work. But for most people it was the most durable and best sound quality, yadda yadda. He talked about focusing on the majority case, making it as good as possible, and then giving a fallback that is also excellent (the old style rubber pad earbuds) for everyone else. Don’t be worried if someone does some niche better than you, he was saying, do the the absolute best for a large number of people and let other people own those niches.