If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster? "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture." Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs performancemotivation
Do they really need it? Does Google really need playful doodles to deliver the value they consistently provide in search results? Does Stripe really need to spend so much energy on the design of its site and SDK’s, which after all, are primarily for the developers that use their API’s? Does Apple really need to sweat the literally thousands of very subtle and often not consciously noticed interactions on its devices? Marty Cagan, Ensuring Excellence On Taste