Success Quote by Guy Kawasaki

Kawasaki nails a whole ecosystem of corporate self-deception in two sentences, using the oldest trick in business: rename the problem until it stops sounding like one. The joke lands because it’s painfully accurate in tech culture, where “objective” engineering talk often gets hijacked by tribal loyalty and PR instincts. When the other guy’s software fails, it’s proof of incompetence, poor architecture, sloppy QA. When yours fails, it’s an edge case, a “quirk,” a regrettable but basically charming personality trait. Same event, opposite moral verdict.

The intent isn’t just to dunk on competitors; it’s to expose a bias that thrives wherever reputations and roadmaps are on the line. “Crash” is blunt, violent, and user-centered: something broke and you suffered. “Idiosyncrasy” is genteel, almost anthropological, as if the program is a complicated artist having a moment. That euphemism shifts blame away from the builder and onto the messy world: the user clicked wrong, the OS is weird, the data was unusual. It’s language as liability management.

Context matters: Kawasaki comes out of the Silicon Valley era where hype cycles, demos, and “shipping” culture reward confidence bordering on delusion. If you admit your product “crashes,” you invite churn, bad press, and internal panic. Call it an “idiosyncrasy,” and you buy time, preserve status, and keep the story intact. The cynicism is the point: tech doesn’t just build software; it builds narratives, and vocabulary is one of the cheapest ways to patch a crack in the myth.