Hasta La Ideas

Relatively speaking, not that much stuff.

A popular thought on human psychology, of the cocktail-party-chatter variety, is that “People don’t regret the things they do; they regret the things they didn’t do.” It’s probably true for the ailing bed-rider who passed on an 18th-birthday bungie-jumping trip, but not so true in the world of industrial design.

“It’s extraordinary,” writes communications coach Carmine Gallo in Forbes, “to think that the world’s top brand has a product portfolio that could fit on a small table.” Gallo is referring to Apple, whose product line-up seems to be inversely proportional to the size to its profits, and serves as a good example of the things they didn’t do.

Gallo is the author of The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success and reveals a Jobs quote that explains Apple’s relatively tiny number of products. (In another Forbes article on Apple’s retail stores, Gallo points out that when the stores were first conceived, pre-iPod, Apple had just four major products to fill it with—two laptops and two desktops.)

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