What I learned from reading Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney.
I just wanted a soundbite.
But he launched into a passionate 20 minutes soliloquy about his latest work.
I could barely get a word in edgewise.
He couldn't help himself.
Design is his passion.
This one was really hard, he said.
He began telling me about how keeping things simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine.
We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential.
But you don't see that effort.
We kept going back to the beginning, again and again.
Do we need that part?
Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?
It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with, reduce and simplify.
This wasn't typical tech industry happy talking.
In releasing new products, companies tended to add more bells and whistles, not take them away.
But here was Johnny saying the opposite.
Not that simplifying was a new approach.
It's design School 101.
But it didn't seem like the real world in 2003.
Only later did I realize that on that June morning in San Francisco, Jony Ive handed me a gigantic clue to the secret of Apple's innovation, to the underlying philosophy that would enable the company to achieve its breakthroughs and become one of the world's dominant corporations.