There’s a good interview with Steve Jobs in the latest Fortune magazine. One of my favorite parts was this:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put inforation into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size. So we decided to not get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod.
That holds very much true at Qloud. We’ve had lots of ideas on our whiteboard and killing some of the good ones is just as hard as building the great ones.
