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"Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97)

Erin Casali · 2.3M views · 2011-06-26 · 3:06

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2012–2026

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What people said

nntwozz · 2026-04 · Reference

Focusing is about saying no. — Steve Jobs [VIDEO] (WWDC '97) This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.

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sixstringtheory · 2022-10 · Reference

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: [VIDEO]

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DonHopkins · 2022-09 · Reference

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 launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo [LIN

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Sources

Video by Erin Casali, played through YouTube.

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