Too: Rams worked in physical media. Eventually you've got to ship, and in his case, he couldn't push updates twice a day. This happens even in software and web design. The "bones" of Linux were layed down in AT&T's labs over 40 years ago. For mainframe computing, history starts over 50 years back.
Even today's major websites have their own mass and inertia in the form of their code base -- you can push changes every 12 hours, if you like but things have to work together, and either modularity or fragility will impose limits on what you can reasonably change and expect to have functioning, stable code.
It simply makes it the final iteration in that development branch.
Edit: and it has in fact been improved in several regards, mostly materials: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/garden/dieter-ramss-606-sh...
I'll add another quote: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry.
Eventually you get there. Or close to it.
Too: Rams worked in physical media. Eventually you've got to ship, and in his case, he couldn't push updates twice a day. This happens even in software and web design. The "bones" of Linux were layed down in AT&T's labs over 40 years ago. For mainframe computing, history starts over 50 years back.
Even today's major websites have their own mass and inertia in the form of their code base -- you can push changes every 12 hours, if you like but things have to work together, and either modularity or fragility will impose limits on what you can reasonably change and expect to have functioning, stable code.