Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success

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.

This is part of the challenge that we non-Steves must face. Most of us aren’t comfortable with the idea of turning into coldhearted control freaks, but we also know that we sometimes need to be tough to keep projects on track.

Being competitive without being arrogant is a difficult thing.

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.

Leonard Bernstein captured this thought perfectly when he said: To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

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

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

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