"It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now"
About this Quote
Jobs is arguing for a kind of productive arrogance: the belief that the future can be designed, not merely surveyed. In the NeXT line, he’s not just defending a long development cycle; he’s attacking the very idea that customers are reliable narrators of their own desires. People can describe irritations in the present, but they’re lousy at imagining the thing that will replace their habits. Ask them what they want and they’ll often request a faster horse with better cupholders.
The subtext is also self-justification, and it’s carefully framed. NeXT was famously late, expensive, and commercially limited, so Jobs converts a vulnerability (three years!) into a virtue (three years because we refused to be small). He positions the company as an artist’s studio rather than a vendor: the job isn’t to mirror demand but to create a new baseline that makes old wants feel provincial. The line “not something they’d want now” implies that desire has an expiration date; pleasing people quickly can mean pleasing them briefly.
Context matters: late-1980s computing was accelerating, and Jobs had been forced out of Apple. NeXT became his proof-of-life project, a way to show he still had the touch. This quote is part manifesto, part alibi, part recruiting pitch to engineers who want to build “the next thing” instead of polishing last year’s request list. It works because it flatters the listener’s impatience with incrementalism while warning that listening too literally is just another way of falling behind.
The subtext is also self-justification, and it’s carefully framed. NeXT was famously late, expensive, and commercially limited, so Jobs converts a vulnerability (three years!) into a virtue (three years because we refused to be small). He positions the company as an artist’s studio rather than a vendor: the job isn’t to mirror demand but to create a new baseline that makes old wants feel provincial. The line “not something they’d want now” implies that desire has an expiration date; pleasing people quickly can mean pleasing them briefly.
Context matters: late-1980s computing was accelerating, and Jobs had been forced out of Apple. NeXT became his proof-of-life project, a way to show he still had the touch. This quote is part manifesto, part alibi, part recruiting pitch to engineers who want to build “the next thing” instead of polishing last year’s request list. It works because it flatters the listener’s impatience with incrementalism while warning that listening too literally is just another way of falling behind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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