The quote is alleged to be Henry Ford, and I've always encountered it as "better horse."
In either case, the customers aren't stupid but instead are using the language and paradigm they are familiar with to describe their needs. Ford did indeed provide a faster/better horse, because the horse was the main means of non-human motive force in the US.
The technologist's job is to understand the universal of possible solutions and to understand the customer's needs and goals, which often includes interrogating and parsing the customer's language/worldview, and craft a product that achieves those needs/goals (and doesn't introduce negatives that overwhelm the benefits).
Regardless of the provenance of that quote, it is quite apt wrt IT clients. They always come asking for a faster horse, ie: something they know that is just better in a specific way.
A lot of the times this might be wrong but I think the interesting part is how that request gets handled.
The horses were themselves a more immediate sanitation problem; in New York alone there was a million pounds of horse manure every day, plus thousands of horses that dropped dead from overwork. Disposing of all the feces and corpses was a challenge.
And to be fair there was a lot of grumbling about the "horseless carriage" for quite awhile.
What's interesting to me is that the oldest streets (ignoring the Main Street) in the local small town are the widest, because they needed to be able to turn around a team of horses and a carriage/wagon even when other wagons are parked on the side. The newer streets (but still 1940-50s) around are narrower because they didn't have to accommodate that.
(Probably not a real quote, and probably not even accurate.)