Time & Perspective Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is taking a flamethrower to the comforting myth that markets are democracies. The line lands because it flips “customer-centric” from virtue to liability: if you treat desire like a stable shopping list, you’ll always arrive late. In the time it takes to design, engineer, ship, and teach people how to use a product, the culture has moved on, competitors have iterated, and customers have reinterpreted their own needs through whatever new tools just appeared.

The intent is partly managerial. Jobs is giving cover to a kind of creative dictatorship: listen to users, sure, but don’t let focus groups steer the wheel. The subtext is bolder and more self-serving: customers often can’t articulate what will delight them until they see it, and the job of a product company is to make the future feel inevitable. It’s also a rebuke to corporate process, where “voice of the customer” can become a paperwork religion that rewards incrementalism and punishes risk.

Context matters because Apple’s identity was built on not merely improving existing categories but redefining them - the iPod collapsing the messy experience of digital music, the iPhone turning a phone into a pocket computer. Jobs is speaking from the tempo of consumer tech, where “want” is not a fixed preference but a moving target shaped by what’s newly possible. The quote works because it frames innovation as a race against time and imagination, not a survey score. It’s persuasive, and dangerous: used well, it justifies visionary leaps; used poorly, it excuses ignoring real pain points in favor of a founder’s hunch.