> It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.

Maybe, but it probably requires a very strong and opinionated leader to pull off. The conventional wisdom in American business leadership seems to be to pursue the lowest level of quality you can get away with, and focus on cutting costs. And you'll have to fight that every second.

I don't think that's true at the individual-contributor level (pursing quality is very motivating), but they people who move up are the ones who sound "smart" by aping conventional wisdom.

> After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

I might give you that "since the late 90s," but there have been significant periods where that wasn't true (e.g. the early mid-90s Mac OS was buggy and had poor foundations).