“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.
Apple, during the Jobs days anyway, produced luxury goods for a luxury price. Given the market they were addressing, Job's comments make complete sense.
Making furniture with features that no one can see except the carpenter is a disadvantage compared to the same carpenter who focuses their time making more their furniture more visually appealing to their customers.
Everyone seems to forget that Apple was nearly bankrupt in the 90s because no one was willing to pay so much for their product when Microsoft did it cheaper and similar quality (from the users perspective).
While Apple is certainly not on the same level as that, the point is true craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail does still exist in consumer goods, and can be handsomely profitable.