Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success

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

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.

Simplicity can make itself known in many forms: products, strategies, corporate hierarchies, processes, ads, speeches, and a hundred other places. But nowhere is Simplicity found in such a concentrated form as the name of a new product.

The cost of the big briefings and subsequent focus groups, including airfare and hotels, must have been huge. During all my years working with Apple as both an agency creative director and a consultant, I never attended a formal meeting like this. In fact, I never even attended an overcrowded meeting. There’s something in the blood at Dell that req

So, can Simplicity help you build the next Apple? Not unless you have a few thousand of the industry’s best people on call. Can Simplicity help you achieve spectacular results for your business? Absolutely. That’s because Simplicity is not the goal—it’s the guiding light that can help a business achieve its goals.

two Steves—the merciless, controlling, unrelenting Steve and the inspiring, charming, and deeply human Steve. It was this combination that made him so fascinating, and it’s what made so many people devote their energy, and much of their lives, to his vision.

He never lost sight of the fact that at the end of the day, technology is about people: what stirs their imaginations, what keeps them satisfied, and what makes them smile.

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

Apple lets Chiat shoot for the stars. If it produces a clunker along the way, the world isn’t going to end. People aren’t going to abandon their Apple equipment on the streets.