Good Products Are Hard to Vary

Good products are hard to vary, similar to how good explanations are hard to vary.

Consider the iPhone's design; despite numerous attempts across generations, its fundamental form factor remains largely unchanged.

The iPhone embodies a smooth, perfect, and beautiful design focused around a single screen, multi-touch functionality, and pocketable form.

Apple and its competitors have found it challenging to deviate significantly from this successful design.

Transcript:

Naval Ravikant

That doesn't just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development. Good products are hard to vary. Go look at the iPhone, this smooth, perfect, beautiful jewel. The form factor hasn't really changed that much since the original one. It's all around the single screen, the multi-touch, embedding the battery, making it fit into your pocket, making it smooth and sliding in your hand, essentially creating the platonic Ideal of the truly personal pocketable computer. So that product is hard to vary. Both Apple and its competitors have tried to vary it across 16 generations of iPhone, and they haven't been able to materially vary it. They've been able to improve the components and improve some of the underlying capabilities, but materially, the form factor is hard to vary. They designed the right thing. There's the

Naval • Good Products Are Hard to Vary