Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success

As those who have worked with Apple will attest, the simpler way isn’t always the easiest. Often it requires more time, more money, and more energy. It might require you to step on a few toes. But more times than not, it will lead to measurably better results.

Simplicity is an open book. The concept has to be quick. The customer has to get it in a second—like “phone, Internet, and iPod, all in one.” Customers need to be able to pick it up and start using it instantly. Most important, it has to improve our lives by an order of magnitude over what’s already available or create an entirely new category by i

brilliant engineers, designers, manufacturers, and marketers performing miracles through a rare combination of technology skills, artistic sensibility, and sheer bravado.

The Apple brand stood for quality, design, and Simplicity, and the Apple Stores brought all three of these things to life.

The more formal the presentation, the more suspicious Steve seemed to get.

Simplicity doesn’t spontaneously spring to life with the right combination of molecules, water, and sunlight. It needs a champion—someone who’s willing to stand up for its principles and strong enough to resist the overtures of Simplicity’s evil twin, Complexity. It needs someone who’s willing to guide a process with both head and heart.

Just understand that Simplicity is more than a goal—it’s a skill. To successfully leverage its power, you need to get good at it. That takes practice. And this is where things get a little tricky. Because the irony is, becoming skilled in Simplicity isn’t that simple. You can’t just learn it; you need to make it second nature.

Mike’s team had been charged with developing a simple way to turn a home movie into a DVD, an app that would later show up as iDVD (one of the iLife apps). He and a partner worked hard to develop their ideas for an interface that would be user-friendly enough for Steve, and prepared to share their work with him by creating all kinds of sample scree

Simplicity is the love child of two of the most powerful forces in business: Brains and Common Sense.

Steve Jobs was one of the most forward-thinking people on this planet, yet he was refreshingly old-fashioned when it came to the use of analytics. He demanded all the information he could get, and he would digest every bit of it—but he took it all in context.