One thing that he really forced down all our throats was the importance of taste. He knew what he wanted, and he made us all see how great it was. Here's a clip from back in 1996, before his return to Apple, where he talks briefly about Microsoft, and in it you can really see his continuing obsession with making insanely great things: [this video]
Because they lack taste for quality and efficiency, they don't want to invest in R&D and they don't know how to retain talents So you get companies that stagnate and higher ups are too focused on building a huge wealth and work hard to secure a golden parachute, maintaining their position and salary is higher priority [this video] This summarize it very well, lack of taste and lack of vision, it's that simple and has huge impact on the products you release as a result Pigeons too busy eating random shit in this particular parking lot, they don't know any better This also shows why [link] Pure lack of taste It translates to: "They are stupid for trying to do better, you should hate them too"
I'm surprised you didn't make the larger point: this is true for every product Microsoft has ever made. Copy, improve, persist. Basic, DOS, Windows, Office, IE, etc. They are not a creative company (or as Jobs would have it they have no taste - [this video] ). Their business does not revolve around creating new things but about copying and improving things that already exist in the market. And to be fair, this strategy has worked out quite well for them so far, so why would they change course?
[link] The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. * Triumph of the Nerds (1996) I didn't verify this link, but google says the interview where Jobs says Microsoft has no taste can be seen here: [this video]
It was 1996 ( [this video] ). No, Jobs was certainly never as humble as Musk and I never said that, they definitely have different characters. My point was that we still have to wait on Musk, this man and his companies are far away from their goals and it remains to be seen whether they can afford to keep being idealistic. And don't get me wrong, I'm a space freak, I root for that guy as much as anyone.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes