Taste will not save you

Taste is the moat. That's become the default career advice across tech, and it's leaking into every field AI touches. The tools can handle production, but they can't replicate taste. Hold on to your taste and you'll be fine.

This is comforting. It's also wrong.

Tasteful products lose all the time

Rdio was better than Spotify. Not by a little, by a lot. Better social features, better music discovery, a more considered design at every level. I used Rdio. Every designer I knew used Rdio. When it shut down in 2015, people wrote eulogies. Wilson Miner, who led Rdio's design from launch, told The Verge that the team had obsessed over refinements that didn't matter:

Spotify won anyway, on distribution, label deals, and a freemium model Rdio refused to adopt. Taste didn't save it from a better business model.

Path was gorgeous and intentional. It capped your network at 150 friends, emphasized close relationships over viral growth, and was genuinely beautiful to use. At its peak Path turned down a $100 million acquisition from Google. It shut down in 2018.

You can run this pattern across a decade of products. The better-designed option loses to the one with wider reach, a smarter business model, or more willingness to burn cash. The tasteful product does not win by default. It doesn't even win most of the time.

Taste, narrowly defined

A defender of the taste-is-the-moat view will say Rdio and Path don't count, and that real taste includes judgment about product-market fit and positioning. But that definition smuggles in a lot. It rolls judgment, discipline, and strategy into a single word, then points at the word and says it's the moat. When everything valuable a designer does counts as taste, of course taste wins.

I mean taste in its narrower sense, the craft-level ability to tell good from bad or to feel when a design is right or wrong. That taste is real. It just isn't what wins.

The Steve Jobs problem

Most conversations about taste in tech arrive at Steve Jobs, partly because so many product leaders have styled themselves after him. He's the proof case: extraordinary taste, extraordinary outcomes.

What gets left out is the decade in between. In 1985, after losing a boardroom fight with John Sculley, the CEO he'd recruited from Pepsi, Jobs was forced out of Apple. He started NeXT the same year, building high-end workstations for universities and research labs. The hardware was a matte black magnesium cube. It was taste with nothing pulling against it: principled and beautiful. By 1993, NeXT had stopped making hardware entirely and was selling only its operating system.

That operating system is what eventually brought Jobs back. Apple had spent years failing to modernize the aging Mac OS, and in 1996 bought NeXT for $429 million, getting both the software it needed and the founder it had pushed out a decade earlier. The tasteful part of NeXT had failed. The pragmatic, technically excellent part is what shipped as Mac OS X four years later.

When Jobs returned, what made him succeed wasn't taste alone. He cut 70% of the product line in his first year, including products people loved. That took authority, credibility earned by nearly failing, and a willingness to leave money on the table. The taste was real. It's also the easiest part to see and the hardest part to copy successfully.

And so a generation of tech leaders has tried to replicate it. Brian Chesky told The Verge about "the gospel of Steve Jobs," and has built much of Airbnb's management philosophy around him. The two never met. Sam Altman spent $3 million on a nine-minute video of himself and Jony Ive strolling through San Francisco, talking about how their AI device will change the course of human evolution, without ever saying what the product is. The video looks like an Apple ad. That's the point. It's pattern-matching on the aesthetic of Jobs without the substance underneath.

The tell is when taste never seems to conflict with the business model. Jobs's taste led to decisions that cost Apple money. He killed the Mac clone program in 1997 and refused to license the OS to anyone else, betting that platform coherence mattered more than licensing revenue. When taste and revenue always align, that's not taste. It's business strategy in a turtleneck and 992s.

Taste unchecked

And sometimes taste is the problem.

After Jobs died, Jony Ive continued pushing Apple's hardware toward ever-thinner designs. Without Jobs to moderate the impulse, thinness became an end in itself. The butterfly keyboard, introduced in 2015, shaved millimeters off the laptop profile. It also broke constantly. A speck of dust could jam a key.

I've used Apple products since the Powerbook G3 era. The butterfly keyboard was the first one that ever sent me to an Apple Store for a repair. I went three times. Apple finally killed the design in 2020.

The butterfly keyboard wasn't a failure of engineering. It was a failure of taste operating without practical discipline. Jobs had both. He could tell you a product was beautiful and also that it needed to work in someone's bag with crumbs in it. Taste moderated by pragmatism is design. Taste without that counterweight is just aesthetics.

Facebook made the same mistake. Paper launched in 2014 as a reimagined version of the Facebook News Feed, containing full-bleed photography and fluid motion that unfolded stories like letters. The Verge called it "the best Facebook app ever." By 2016 it was dead. Facebook absorbed a few of its design ideas into the main app, but even those were eventually filtered back out when they hurt engagement.

What taste actually is

I say this as someone who has spent a career valuing taste, and who has watched it lose to sharper execution, better business models, and sheer operational ruthlessness at every company I've worked at. Taste is the most visible part of the work, which is why it keeps getting mistaken for the whole of it. And anyone telling designers to lean into it right now (because AI can't touch it, because taste is the moat) is pointing them at the one part of the job that was never in danger.