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Knowing When to Say "No"

October 21st, 2009

Application Development, Information Architecture, Web Development

Something to think about….

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do [x]?”, “Do you plan to add [y]?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait – put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”
-Derek Sivers, president and programmer, CD Baby and HostBaby (from Say NO by default)

Randall Davis

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3 Responses to “Knowing When to Say "No"”

  1. jmoffitt says:

    Just say no to “Design by Committee” and say yes to Simplicity. Something is not necessarily “better” because it has more features, it just has “more” features.

    Simplicity Quotes -

    Simplicity is Complexity Resolved – Constantin Brancusi (modern artist)

    Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein

    The simplest of two competing theories is to be preferred – Occam’s Razor

  2. Randall Davis says:

    Nice :)

  3. [...] is a good quote from Steve Jobs captured in a NavigationArts blog that raises some of the challenges of managing feature [...]

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