Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos took on the FAA and won

As I write this post during take off, I am reminded of the power of compelling and amazing products.

For the longest time, the FAA had this silly rule about electronics. Until the kindle showed up it was a minor nuisance. You learned to read your book during flights. And heck the size of the seats made it impractical to use a laptop except for business travelers.

Then the kindle showed up and all of a sudden the rule became a source of intense aggravation but heck it only affected those of us that wanted to read.

For the first time the rule became irritating.

But when the iPhone showed up the rule became unbearable.

You couldn’t play a game of words with friends, your kid couldn’t keep watching a movie and you couldn’t read a book. So we started breaking the rule all of the time.

There were moments like these you could never record.

Your son clutching his toy helicopter and airplane, eyes as big as saucers staring out of airplane all because of bad bad science.

I don’t know if Amazon or Apple ever lobbied on our behalf, but I doubt it.

What took down the stupid rule was that Steve and Jeff created a product that consumers demanded to use all of the time making the rule unenforceable.

Great products can transform the world by creating a demand to overturn something stupid. Something to think about as we build stuff.