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by aaron-lebo 2239 days ago
Exactly! I worship at the altar of Steve. I've got a shrine in my house. That quote is kind of at the heart of what I wrote.

It's why I said:

> The user a lot of times doesn't know what they want or need until they see it, so it comes down to us, the designers to empathize and guide the user.

Users do not want complexity, they want to be empowered. There is a subtle but important difference there and it's easy to disguise the latter as the former.

Is that a quibble over semantics? It might be. But to call the post "nonsense" is just as much of a quibble, because there's real truth there, the success and adoption of the Mac etc is proof of it.
1 comments
abernard1 2239 days ago
Apple is pretty unsuccessful at most _software_ that isn't a commodity. They're a hardware and marketing company at their core. All the actual value from software on their platform comes from 3rd party providers, whether that's apps or SaaS.

The easiest point to make on this is that Apple has botched all of their SaaS offerings not related to content. And their office applications are borderline unusable for anything aside from education or the content industry. Everyone adopts either Google Suite or Microsoft Office (or a combo) depending on their use case.

It's highly arguable that Apple "empowers" people with software given that everybody uses software on top of their platform not provided by Apple.

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aaron-lebo 2239 days ago
You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though.

To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating.

If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.

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