I use that quote similarly. It's about knowing where you stand, where the value is, and of course not chasing the shiny new thing.... Perhaps Its pragmatic humility. That's how I see it.

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There was a discussion earlier about innovations in tech in the past 10-15 years.

It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.

But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.

Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.

I don't feel that this is a reply to the parent comment at all?

>Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.

It seems like very much a comment about the broader ecosystem being a bigger factor than an individual device.

"The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts" is not the same as "gets you to somewhere else entirely"

Same here, I think about that line often. It applies to a lot of different scenarios in tech.

The most common one is probably pointless redesigns. Outside of games, users usually aren't pulling up a particular app for the pleasure of using it, they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.

> they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.

I feel much the same way about git.