Its a long running meme on slashdot. The original quote serves as a good example of how people most close to tech often have different views on it than its consumers.

It is also an example of how the technically superior product doesn't always win.

I'd say it's more an illustration of how "technically superior" can be difficult to measure on paper.

It's easy to compare specs, it's harder to compare the things that really matter: usability, elegance, workflow, functional performance, robustness, and aesthetics. These are the enduring characteristics of every product, and often it's easy to ignore such things given that they are very difficult to objectively measure.

Performance, for example, can be measured easily in terms of responsiveness of the UI, etc. But that doesn't reflect the actual end-to-end performance and perception of performance as experienced by a user performing real-world tasks. The same goes for usability, which is almost impossible to fully objectively measure.

It's easy to dismiss a product as inferior because it lacks features or has a different set of characteristics compared to an existing popular product, but that only works when there are no significant underlying differences in the above meta-features.

When Japanese car makers started to introduce their automobiles to the American market a lot of people made fun of their cars. Often the cars were small and underpowered in the muscle car dominated American market. But what those detractors didn't realize at the time was that those cars were extremely reliable and efficient, even if they lacked power and "cool" points. And eventually those types of cars came to be hugely popular.

"Survival of the fittest" often challenges our notions of what constitutes "fit".

Don't conflate "technically superior" with "more featureful" and "bigger numbers".

Because industrial design and UX doesn't matter when stacked against a spec list?

The iPod's success showed that yes, industrial design and UX do matter and can beat a spec list.

That was actually the common wisdom at the time, as I recall.

Qualifying that statement with "at the time" is being awfully generous to the present.

Because a spec list doesn't matter compared to the marketing engine that is Apple. Many superior products fell afoul of that.

Before the iPod/iMac, Apple didn't have that marketing engine. They didn't have that stellar reputation. They built that from nothing with a single generation of products.

Today, Apple occupies a special place in the market that very few players could approach. In 2000? That market was wide open for anybody who could get their crap together and do the same things Apple did - well-designed products with a good marketing campaign. The PC industry was only just starting to abandon the ugly beige metal boxes.

Now, 14 years later, we have ugly black boxes.

The iPod was demonstrably and objectively superior to its early competitors in an important way: you could navigate to your songs more quickly and easily.