Bill gates famously said that no company can make an ecosystem that is incompatible with every other ecosystem and still be successful. At least if they don’t have Steve Jobs at the top. So how did he take a struggling company to being the most valuable company in the world and having a cult like status? How was Steve Jobs able to make products, most of which had glaring omissions and still became some of the most iconic and successful products of all times.

It all can be explained by a simple formula

Take care of the 90%, screw the 10%

It was Steve jobs favorite formula. Let me explain it a bit. It meant that the machine should be perfect for the 90% of tasks the users wants to do. And just screw the 10% of tasks that people rarely do.

Might sound a bit rudimentary but it was the essence of how every product was crafted at Apple. Let’s take some examples to put this theory to test.

Let’s take the first example as the iPhone. This phone was revolutionary but it still does not have flash or complete multitasking. The reason is simple enough. By providing partial multitasking 90% of tasks are achieved, so people will rarely miss multitasking. And Flash is also nearing its end, so why support it when HTML5 was getting better and better. So by sacrificing these 10% tasks part, he made the decision that improved battery life tremendously, and took care of the 90% part.

Take another example. The Macbook Air. The thinnest laptop of its time. It was sleek, insanely thin and beautiful. But it too had some omissions. Like lack of Ethernet port, or no optical disk drive. Pretty bold moves they were. But Steve knew that these are the 10% of the tasks a user would do. So why waste precious space on the disk drive. Or why would a person need an Ethernet port. Just try to remember when was the last time you used the Ethernet port. So by removing these things, which people rarely did, he made the device thinner. He compromised on the things that people are rarely going to use and instead concentrated on improving the 90% tasks.

All these decisions boil down to one last question. Are they really necessary? Are they essential to be a part of the product? Are they important enough to be the part of 90%? Will the product be better off if these rarely used features are removed from the machine? If not then they are deemed unnecessary, no matter how stark the reaction is because at the end, what you get is a product that you will truly love. At least for 90% of your time spent on it.