David Karp Quotes

We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed - and truly delightful - to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait - put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

I've been working on the new Miracle Mop for many years.

When I look at other products, I naturally think of ways to improve upon what already exists.

We all have original ideas. Even if we don't see ourselves as supercreative or as wild nonconformists, we have insights every day about how the world around us could be better. It might be a better way of running meetings in your office that would be less mind-numbing. It might be a little twist on a product or a service.

Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

You don't always have to start over to create an emotional reaction to your product. It's always powerful to deliver a breakthrough, but there's also a true art to making something great even better.

Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.

Since your company is the product that makes all of your other products, it should be the best product of all. When you begin to think of your company this way, you evaluate it differently. You ask different questions about it. You look at improving it constantly, rather than just accepting what it's become.

Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you're providing the customers. It's another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.

If a whole bunch of users want a specific feature, and we think that feature is pretty cool, too, that that's just what we'll do.

Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.

Once your product is working, switch from not caring about this to caring about this a little bit.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the product. When you read the press, people say, "Oh, the product needs improvement." I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" Because they can improve that product. That leaves more upside from an innovation and revenue potential than you're gonna find in a lot of places. So you could say that's a downside, I see that as an opportunity.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Every feature has some maintenance cost, and having fewer features lets us focus on the ones we care about and make sure they work very well.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

I know there's been questions about-so how long does that continue-and we've now been very clear about that, that software updates to Symbian devices are expected until at least 2016. So there's a long history still to be paved for Symbian in the future.

We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.