Referencing John Gruber's post on Working Backwards to the Technology.
This is a wonderful story about the core of Apple / Jobs' philosophy. The post quotes from a 1997 video of Steve Jobs, soon after he returned to Apple and started to change its strategy:
Jobs:
What about OpenDoc? What about it? [Audience laughs.] It’s dead, right? Let me say something that’s sort of generic. I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. I feel your pain. But Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers — lousy management. And what happened was you look at the farm that’s been created with all these different animals going in different directions and it doesn’t add up. The total is less than the sum of the parts.
And so we had to decide, what are the fundamental directions we’re going in? And what makes sense and what doesn’t? And there were a bunch of things that didn’t. And microcosmically they might have made sense; macrocosmically they made no sense. And you know, the hardest thing is… you think about focusing, right? You think, “Well, focusing is saying yes”. No, focusing is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no. And you’ve got to say no, no, no. When you say no, you piss off people.
Everyone who wants to understand strategy should know this. Focus (or choices) is really about saying No. Particularly when there are so many things that one can possibly do (or one is already doing). Even at the cost of pissing off some people.
And if you click on the link at the end of that post, you will come up with this Apple video. Almost every company has a vision, mission, values statements typed out on posters and screen-savers, but unfortunately, their employees or other stakeholders don't know what it means. But this video, in 90 seconds, tells all of us what Apple stands for.