Let’s go do it!

Another favorite Steve Jobs quote is from his 1997 WWDC fireside chat with developers, which happens right after everyone knows “Steve is back” but before he’s been announced as CEO (or even iCEO, the cutesy shorthand they gave him for Interim CEO).

Like many people, Steve struggles to understand how it is that better solutions don’t get the adoption they deserve.

And so, it’s amazing to me that something as obvious as email is so broken out there. Netscape’s is awful. I mean, everybody’s is awful. And if something so obvious as email is so broken…

And the other one I mentioned before: spreadsheets.

If you use Improv or Quantrix for a week, you would go, “How come this hasn’t completely replaced Excel?” for 75% of the people out there.

25% will still want Excel, for good reason.

But for 75% of the people, why hasn’t this replaced it?

And there are no answers to these questions except – “let’s go do it!”

And that’s my attitude about this thing.

The thing that’s striking to me here is that Steve isn’t thinking “There are all these better solutions out there, but nobody adopts them. Let’s give up.”

Instead, despite having no good answers for why the better solutions aren’t adopted yet, his attitude is “let’s go do it”. Let’s figure out why the better solution hasn’t been adopted yet, and let’s tear down adoption barriers until it can be.