We can't ship junk

I am obsessed with an answer that Steve Jobs gave in a 2007 press conference. I recommend watching the video but I’ve transcribed the exchange here:

Hi, I’m Molly Wood from CNET. I have a question, actually, about market share, which is sort of what we’re getting at. There has been a suggestion that, because of pricing and design, Apple tends to appeal to kind of a smaller elite rather than that mass customer base. So, I guess, once and for all: is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?

Jobs responded:

You know, I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world, and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends.

And, we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you, there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends – and we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.

So, there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are, but we want to make the best personal computers in the industry, and we think there’s a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too.

And what you’ll find is our products are usually not premium-priced. You go and price out our competitors’ products and you add the features you have to add to make them useful, and you’ll find, in some cases, they are more expensive than our products.

The difference is, we don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products. You know? We just don’t offer categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty favorably. And a lot of people have been doing that and saying that now for the last 18 months.

I love this answer so much.

For software (and even for hardware), product quality is a very nebulous thing. It’s hard to measure; you know it when you see it. How can even a highly-motivated team pursue such an ill-defined goal? The trap, of course, is that you waste precious time spinning your wheels in pursuit of product improvement on a dimension you cannot reliably observe or measure. What are you to do?

Jobs lays out the answer: set a holistic target (“the best personal computers in the world”) and enforce it at every level and in every area (“we don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products”). Product quality is a holistic trait that exhibits weakest-link behavior. As a result, trying to measure the impact of the quality of individual features is a fool’s errand. Instead, top-down coordination is required to correctly incentivize high-quality delivery. Done correctly, this becomes cultural (“there are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are”).

Since that day in 2007, Apple’s stock is up about %5,000. Mostly that’s because they make the best personal computers in the world, including ones that fit in your pocket!