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Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

Here's my problem with that quote: it comes from the same man who also said "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."

Considering that context, I view his horses quote as another expression of his contempt for what other people want, even when they want something reasonable.

Also, Henry Ford did not invent the car. Cars existed before he mass produced them; had he asked people what they wanted, people probably would have said "a car I can afford" not "a faster horse."

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Here's my problem with people that have heard a few popular quotes and think they understand the whole story: for the first several years the Model T came in several different colors. It switched to black only because of demand, then eventually they went back to offering multiple colors when they could.

Ford only switched to making black cars only when the demand was so high that the production lines couldn't keep up. It wasn't contempt for the customer that made him do it, his choice was either to streamline the production process or to raise prices so that demand would drop. The selling point of his cars were that the common man could afford them, not that they were colorful. He made an appropriate business choice, not some user-hostile choice.

But I think that quote is usually invoked by people when they blatantly disregard the wishes of their customers.

It's just a way to justify "screw the users, they have no idea what they want, I know what they want, because I'm a genius like Henry Ford, and my users are stupid."

I heard that Steve Jobs was fond if saying that. And sure, Steve Jobs had a lot of success, but people don't remember his failures as much. Steve Jobs was responsible for the Apple III, a fiasco for Apple computers because Jobs insisted on not having fans in it.

He was adamant that the era of fans in computers was over, and the Apple III was a disaster that kept overheating. I am sure that when engineers tried talking Jobs into reconsidering, they just gave them that Henry Ford platitude and dismissed them.

I have heard so many times disastrously unpopular UX redesigns and dark patterns were justified with pigheaded platitudes about how stupid users are.

So regardless of what Henry Ford himself actually meant at the time, the perception today is that it was justification for disregarding customers.

Part of the reason you have a problem with the same man making both of those quotes is that the "faster horse" quote was likely not said by Henry Ford.

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/10/10/fact-check-henry-ford-q...

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

It's not that unreasonable -- a reasonable number of reasonable configuration options produces a very unreasonable application.

I think it was probably reasonable for him to only offer his car in black due to mass manufacturing logistics of the time. However I think he could have explained this, instead of making some pithy remark about other people having wrong opinions or something.

>However I think he could have explained this, instead of making some pithy remark about other people having wrong opinions or something.

That's hardly fair when you're talking in quotes. These are by-definition snippets taken out of context.

Actually I'll make a stronger statement: it's an absurd request. You can't just judge someone, and their mindset, based on a single random statement they made that somehow became popularly remembered across all the other million of statements they made. You have to at least make the effort to find a small body of work to judge by

Anyways, at least according to this guy[0], Ford likely never said it except as a joke.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Henry-Ford-say-%E2%80%9CA-cust...

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