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Dan Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, quotes Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt as saying "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!". Googling now, the quotation seems rather famous on its own.

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Great book (It's Don Norman BTW, rather than Dan), though thinking about the quote now, presumably the purchaser doesn't actually want a quarter-inch hole for its own properties, but has some further goal in mind that the hole lets them achieve and could peaked be achieved better without requiring a hole or a drill.

Funny about the name. I picked it up off my shelf to confirm the quote and got the author wrong. Amusing.

In the book, Norman says exactly the same thing. That people are looking for something to achieve some goal, and the hole and, consequently, drill are just means to that end.

Of course the spirit of the quotation is different. It means "serve the ultimate goal, not the task chosen to achieve that goal", so it encompasses this with some degree of rhetorical flourish.

But wouldn't this quote only be true if said drill self-destructed after a single use?

Perhaps a better quote would be "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want (a) quarter-inch hole(s)!"

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