A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.
Interpretation
Products should be innovative enough to stand out, yet accessible enough not to alienate users.
This quote by Reid Hoffman emphasizes the delicate balance that product developers must maintain between innovation and usability. While it is crucial for a product to offer unique features that set it apart from competitors, there is a fine line where excessive innovation can deter users who may find the advancements too complex or unfamiliar. Thus, the quote underscores the importance of aligning innovation with user needs to ensure successful adoption.
In practice
In a presentation on product strategy, one might quote this to highlight the importance of user-centered design.
Leaders, whether in the public or the private sphere, must understand the responsibilities that come with their role. They are the most visible standard-bearers of their organizations. Holding them accountable to this responsibility protects the promise of our organizations and our communities.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly - more 'efficient' - will inevitably make it less just.
I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.
Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there.
Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.
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