If you showed TiVo to Steve Jobs, his head would explode¹

Last weeks episode of Hypercritical featured a truly epic rant by John Siracusa about the TiVo Premier Elite. I listened to it this morning and thought it was really great. Apart from the pure amusement of hearing someone complain so passionately that you as a listener fear that he will get a brain aneurism, it also contained a pass about the attention to details, which he did not elaborate on, but that I found really interesting and important.

Part of the rant was about the menus on the TiVo. Apparently² previously they haven’t been high definition, even though previous devices had been HD devices. In the Premier Elite version this was said to be fixed, but some lower level menus still contained standard definition graphics. This is the kind of faulty detail that most people will live with but that drives obsessive perfectionists list Siracusa insane. When asked by Dan Benjamin to guess why TiVo hadn’t bothered to fix something like this, Siracusa thought that it likely was because some number cruncher had decided that it would give enough return on investment to justify the efforts spent. It was in this context that he said the thing about Jobs’s head explode.

I think he really nailed what separates a few companies (among them Apple) from the rest; the attention to all those tiny details that in themselves will not provide enough of an improvement of the product to get sufficiently more revenue to justify the investment. It is however, in my humble opinion, this meticulous work that result in a product that ”just works” of feels so much more smother, better and is simply joyous to use. The result from all these small improvements is so much bigger than the sum of them. And, as proved by Apple, the return on investment can be tremendous in the long run if you stick to it.

The lesson I will take from this is to always sweat the details, keep pushing the good or workable to excellent. That is the only way to accomplish something truly amazing, whether it is a piece of computer hardware, a web site or a lecture.

Anyway, listened to Hypercritical #59 for some great entertainment and an important lesson and, most importantly, pay attention to the details as well as the whole in your work and you will output greater results.