“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
The Work Is in the Thinking
From Steve Jobs, interviewed by Andy Reinhardt, “There’s Sanity Returning” (BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998), conducted May 11, 1998 in Apple’s fourth-floor boardroom. The line follows Jobs’s framing of “focus and simplicity” as one of his mantras.
At the September 1997 Apple Town Hall, his first month back, Jobs drew a 2x2 grid on a whiteboard: consumer vs pro on one axis, desktop vs portable on the other. The pitch was that Apple should make one great product in each of the four cells, and nothing else. At the time Apple shipped roughly 350 SKUs across overlapping lines: Performa, Quadra, Centris, multiple PowerBook generations, Newton, eMate, plus printers and other peripherals. Jobs’s stated rationale was that he himself could not tell a customer which Mac to buy.
The grid filled in over 1997-1999. The Power Mac G3 and PowerBook G3 (pro/desktop and pro/portable) shipped in November 1997. The iMac (consumer/desktop) was announced May 6, 1998 (five days before this interview) and shipped that August. The iBook (consumer/portable) followed in September 1999. In parallel, Jobs killed everything not in the grid: Newton (February 1998), eMate, the printer division, dozens of Performa SKUs. Apple’s product line dropped from roughly 350 SKUs to a handful, and the company returned to profitability in fiscal 1998.
When Jobs said this on May 11, 1998, the grid was eight months old, two of its four cells were shipping product, the third had just been announced, and the cuts were largely done. The “clean thinking” was the 2x2 framework; the simple output was the four products and the cleared catalog around them.