What Do I Want To Do When I Grow Up?

I come back to this question, now and again, when things are tough; when I find that I want to break out of the mold that I'm in, and head in a different direction. Springing from all the latest MacWorld speculation, I re-read an old posting on Daring Fireball about Apple's culture.

[W]hat gets chalked up as devotion to/obsession with Apple is, in fact, devotion to/obsession with great design, and there’s an utter dearth of rival PC or handheld gadget makers that value design as Apple does. The last time I was truly interested in an operating system that wasn’t from Apple was BeOS, and that was over 10 years ago...

[M]any ... companies see Apple’s success this decade as an aberration — that the Apple bubble will soon pop and mediocre jumbles will return to the top of the technology heap. But what if it’s the other way around, and the aberration was Apple’s tepid success in the 1990s?

I sure hope that many more companies follow the Apple path. It's that kind of attention to detail that I want to see out of products, and what I like to put into my work. Being in an environment where others don't value going that extra mile is usually what makes things tough for me. That's when I start asking the question again.