[iaskwhy]

Just the other I realised Jobs was right saying the size of the iPhone was perfect because of human thumb size, his mistake at the time (assuming he really thought this through and wasn't just being a salesman) was to think consumers would always value the ergonomics above everything else. In time, even Apple realised consumers were probably favouring other things like the screen size itself even when ergonomics suffered a lot with it. It's a very important message right there for any one size fits all strategy.

[smacktoward]

It wasn't a mistake -- "consumers don't know what they really want, so we'll only sell the version they should want" was straightforward Jobsian thinking.

It's similar another famous case of a perfectionist founder rejecting customers' demands, Henry Ford's famous statement about the Model T that "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black." (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7213/pg7213.html#id00226)