Taste and Opinion

This post is a critique of present day Apple software without Steve Jobs:

The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference… Software lives or dies on judgment calls a thousand times a day… Those decisions can’t be operationally optimized. They have to be made by someone who actually uses the thing and has an opinion.

Which made me think of Ira Glass’s observation that closing the gap between knowing what’s good and being able to make it requires caring enough to keep trying. That’s not something you can operationalize away.