I feel like people don’t get why Steve Jobs was ultimately so successful. It wasn’t because of his huge ego or because he could be a complete jerk. It wasn’t because of his incredible charisma, although that helped.

And it wasn’t just because Steve could read the tea leaves and figure out where technology was going — yes, he did this very well, but he consistently was too early by five or ten years.

It was because Steve used his own products and constantly CONSTANTLY demanded they be better. In every little way. He cared about every tiny detail that made his things harder to use.

As an undergrad at UW I was introduced to Steve as a NeXT programmer at a tech demo in Seattle. Steve: “What do you think?" I said: love NeXTstep, but some APIs were missing. “Like what?” Well…it’s kinda picky, but...when we make a table, it’s hard to change the color of a row.

Steve whips out his cell phone. Beep-beep-beep-boop. He’s calling Brian Pinkerton, who was a grad student at UW (and also a friend — we met at UW). Brian had most recently worked on the table view class at NeXT. (He also invented the internet search engine, btw.)

It’s 7pm. Brian is at his home, back in Seattle. Paraphrased: “Hey Brian, why can’t you set a color on a row in a table view? Is that something hard to do? Can you fix that? Ok great.”

Sorted.

Not sure how long it was until Brian forgave me for that whole episode.

But the point is, here’s Steve, who’s running this company that will change the way most of us program, and he hears a tiny complaint and he acts on it. He’s not all, “I’m the CEO, file a bug.”

Postscript: Brian is apparently now in charge of Siri at Apple and also hasn’t aged a day since he was 23.