Insanely Simple

Ken Segall ran Apple's advertising during the Jobs era. He named the iMac and wrote 'Think Different.' His thesis is that the one force behind every great Apple decision was an obsession with simplicity, defended by Jobs against everyone who wanted to add just one more thing. It's nicely written and genuinely entertaining. But I don't buy it. The best thing this book transmitted to me wasn't the thing Segall set out to teach. After reading a stack of Apple books, I don't think maximizing simplicity is WHY Apple won. My own outsider conclusion is that the people who made Apple great, Steve and the engineers around him, were creatives who happened to love technology. Creative in the way an artist is. You don't write a book or design a logo in one sitting. You make something, walk away, come back, see it from a new angle, and let the process work on you. Apple built products the same way, except the artists were engineers building things they personally wanted to use, trusting their taste over data in a way Google or a normal startup never would. Read it right after Creative Selection and that pattern jumps out at you. As a practical playbook it's thin, which is why it lands in C tier for me. As a story, it's a good one.