Posted by Nathan
I love Drew Breunig's visual depiction of the passage from Issacson's biography of Steve Jobs when he simplifies Apple's product lineup.
Upon returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs toured the company in an attempt to understand its products and how they fit together. He found a dozen versions of the Mac, each with a confusing name and built without perspective for what other teams were building. After many meetings, and many cut products, it all snapped into place. Isaacson writes:
“Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled.
…
The result was that the Apple engineers and managers suddenly became sharply focused on just four areas. For the professional desktop quadrant, they would work on making the Power Macintosh G3. For the professional portable, there would be the PowerBook G3. For the consumer desktop, work would begin on what became the iMac. And for the consumer portable, they would focus on what would become the iBook. (pp. 337-338).
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