“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
I think software as a whole suffers greatly from this "well, I got it barely done, technically fulfilling the requirements, so my work is over" attitude.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/445621-when-you-re-a-carpen...
Using expensive wood or spending time doing things nobody will see will lower your throughout and raise your costs unnecessarily for the customer.
Even a master carpenter has finite time and money. Every morcel of time spent doing things nobody can see is time not spent doing other things with more visibility. The masters are still competing with other masters in a globally competitive market.
So Job’s fictional carpenter would get outcompeted by the hypothetical free market where carpenters of equal skill are producing more at lower cost.
I think the point of the story is that Jobs's carpenter is not even trying to compete with Walmart trash products. He is deliberately avoiding the market that is sensitive to higher costs.
This hypothetical carpenter would be competing with other carpenters at the same skill level.