That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.
Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product.
His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates.
Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.
> "You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is."
This is a fairly standard "engineering" view of the world. It is also why 90% of startups go out of business.
> "The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd."
That is one alternative, but certainly not the only alternative. You could also get out and talk to your potential customers, find out what their problems are and what it would take to solve them, then build what THEY think is right. The nice side effect is you'll already know who the consumer is.
As a customer, I do have a stake in something when I put down my credit card. If a company doesn't respect me as their customer, you bet I will not be repeating my business.
However, the business can (and SHOULD) decide if they want me as a customer. If they don't, they should make it clear. I think Apple does this very well: You are given the Apple sandbox that is very well defined. If you don't like it, don't buy Apple (yet, people still do, then bitch forever about it).
I think that every business should listen to its customers, though obviously not without having a grand vision in mind. That will mean losing customers, but each business has a risk at its heart.
I think rejecting Flash is part of a vision I'd want to buy into (and have, I type this on an iPad). There are going to me more tradeoffs like this, and in Apple's case I think they're going to be consistent with a product-centric vision.
So far I like that product and what it's turning into, so I think Apple is taking the right risk.
The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me.
Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.
