"Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the canonical source for the 'focus is saying no' quote, cited in threads on product decisions such as dropping old hardware support.
What it is
A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997 explaining that focus means saying no to many good ideas. It is a short answer about product strategy and its effect on people.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2012 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Cites ryannielsen · 2012-07 · on “Apple To Release Mountain Lion On July 25”
It isn't like these support issues are a surprise to them, they just have different priorities than fixing them. Exactly! Like I said, I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere. Supporting 6 year old hardware is a very, very low priority, so they didn't spend any resources on it. As SJ himself said, focus is about saying "no". This video discusses OpenDoc, but it could just as easily apply to supporting 6 year old hardware: [this video] Apple is always pushing forward. Sometimes perhaps a bit too aggressively, but they're always pushing forward.
Cites DonHopkins · 2018-11 · on “At least it wasn't Oracle”
Then there were Apple and IBM's two joint ventures: Taligent and Kaleida (where I worked on ScriptX until it shut down). [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Working at Kaleida was like having parents who couldn't get along and argued all the time, so no hard decisions ever actually got made. ScriptX supported QuickTime on MacOS, Windows and OS/2, but Apple was shy about IBM and other companies having access to the source code. IBM desperately wanted everyone to use and love OS/2 (so they renamed it Warp so the cool kids would dig it), while Taligent was tasked at solving the problem of Apple's shitty operating system. Taligent also had their own weird incompatible object model, as well as CommonPoint's "pe
Cites DonHopkins · 2022-09 · on “Get in zoomer, we're saving React”
That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. [LINK] >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance lau
Cites sixstringtheory · 2022-10 · on “Focus is saying no to good ideas”
Funny enough the next suggested play after that video is this one where the article got its headline from, which it credited to Steve jobs in the first paragraph, from WWDC ‘97: [this video]
Cites nntwozz · 2026-04 · on “Why macOS27 won't be supporting Intel anymore”
Focusing is about saying no. — Steve Jobs [this video] (WWDC '97) This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.