From Steve Jobs’s obituary in the New York Times:
He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”
I think this is one of Jobs’s big (and I hope lasting) ideas: taste isn’t a small thing. It’s evidence of culture, humanity, innovation and beauty.
Jobs famously said this about Microsoft’s (lack of) taste:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products. … and you say, Why is that important? and, well, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.