18 ms·

Steve was a notoriously hard person to work with. Realistically, anyone who Steve was likely to name as his successor would be a follower, someone who went alon

Steve was a notoriously hard person to work with. Realistically, anyone who Steve was likely to name as his successor would be a follower, someone who went along with whatever Steve said and told him what he wanted to hear. What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve.

Uhhrrr 10y ago
True, but of course the choice was up to Steve Jobs, not Apple. Also, how the hell would you hire "person like Steve" anyway?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- visakanv 10y ago
  As Paul Graham said, "So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
wineisfine 10y ago
This is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook). In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.
- triangleman 10y ago
  How do you figure there has been a "shift" like you said? In 2007 Jobs was using the phrase "post-PC", and by the time he died in 2011, more than half of Apple's revenue was iPhone/iPad/etc. To me it seems that Cook is just continuing the trend.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Precisely. Continuing Steve's vision as best they can imagine it (not well). Don't forget when he used the post-PC phrase he was very clear PCs are still going to be needed and valued. It wasn't supposed to be either-or. Pretty sure in 6 years Jobs would have picked up some new trends, details and directions. Pretty sure we'd not be stuck in some infinte repeat loop. Thinner. Groundhog Day. Repeat.
  - wineisfine 10y ago
    The shift is the pure neglect towards the dev community. Something that most likely would not have happened so blatant and fast under Jobs. It is also completely not necessary that making great phones excludes a company from making at least decent upgrade cycles in their computer hardware. Why should one exclude the other?
    - caconym_ 10y ago
      How do you figure "pure neglect"? What are the features you're missing in the current Mac lineup? Which products from other manufacturers make a meaningful improvement on Apple's offering for "devs"?
      - Lio 10y ago
        Well a computer with enough GPU performance to work with VR would be a nice start. Apple don't currently have anything available other than hacking an eGPU set up together. The "current" Mac Pro is over 3 (4?) years old now. Users can't upgrade it because of the proprietary GPU cards and Apple don't seem able to keep it relevant themselves. It's difficult to have a professional relationship with a supplier where the best options for macOS are either a dodgy Hackintosh or a used 2012 Mac Pro with a new GPU.
- gutnor 10y ago
  Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along. The true value of Steve Jobs is the reality distortion field. That's really was is missing here with the new Mac. All the discutable decisions about the Mac that people complain about are just similar to the trends set under Jobs, the difference is that he would make the people believe that Apple was 100% behind the Mac. There would no need for Jobs to write twice in a month to employee and the press to say that Apple was committed to it. I'm not sure what is missing exactly, but the MBP failed at delivery rather than feature. For example, did Apple really need to can all their Mac related accessories at the same time, building up a negative climate. They could have rebranded the LG monitor. Somehow give the people a hint that Apple is behind the USB-C, not just picking up and leave it up to the third party to sort out. (which is BTW what Apple has always really done, it just seemed handled better) Apple strategy is to keep everything secret until they do a big delivery event. They are utterly bad at delivery since Jobs is gone, and the lengthy secrecy they keep around everything is now not building hype, just building apprehension.
  - leoc 10y ago
    > Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along. That's not the case: back in 2001 post-PC thinking was popular too, and Jobs stood out against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI . That's evidently why Jobs was so reluctant to make the iPod work with Windows PCs: his whole plan for the iPod was to have it sell his intended Digital Hub, the Mac. He did eventually come around to post-PC thinking of course, but only quite late: even in the D 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 he and Gates were quite resistant to it.
snowwrestler 10y ago
> What Apple needed was another person like Steve I know--so obvious, right? All they needed was another Steve Jobs. Why didn't they think of that, and just go out and get one? I hear they grow on trees.
bangonkeyboard 10y ago
> What Apple needed was another person like Steve... They had one. Tim fired him.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  What makes Forstall so great? If he's truly worthy of that comparison, perhaps Apple should buy him along with Snap; it would be hilarious if Snapchat turned out to be the NeXTSTEP of this generation. Wouldn't Fadell be just as good?
  - bangonkeyboard 10y ago
    Scott Forstall combined Steve Jobs's sensibilities and obsessive attention to detail with a deep, working background in software engineering. He championed UI usability and responsiveness, spearheaded accessibility initiatives out of care rather than for PR, and led the OS X, iOS, and Safari teams through arguably their best and most reliable years. Scott Forstall is why the iPhone was the iPhone. Tony Fadell was almost why the iPhone was an iPod.
    - rarepostinlurkr 10y ago
      Scott didn't manage the "macOS" team sorry. Bertrand, Craig & Andreas, not Scott.
- illumin8 10y ago
  Yes, but Forstall was responsible for skeumorphism across all of iOS, so I'm not certain he really was as visionary as Jobs.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    Not to mention, the Maps fiasco happened under his watch.
    - leonroy 10y ago
Apocryphon 10y ago
Perhaps they should rehire Jean-Louis Gassée. Buy up the remnants of BeOS from Access, just for good measure.
simonh 10y ago
Then you'd expect all the executive team at Spple to be Steve's hand selected Yes Men, a bunch of followers unable to do their own thing. Yet what we hear from people who actually worked for Steve that this isn't how he operated or selected talent at all. He ruthlessly weeded out Yes Men. What you're representing is the caricature of Steve Jobs, but a one dimensional personality like that could never have achieved what he did.
bamurphymac1 10y ago
I've thought about this a lot. Wouldn't Steve have realized this inherent contradiction? Is this an understood reality at the top levels at Apple? That is, does Tim see his role now as maximizing revenue from the current position, with the goal being to hand off a healthier company to a "visionary" successor? My personal answer fluctuates depending on my daily gut feeling about human nature. And how many times sourcekit crashes.
- visakanv 10y ago
  I think about this a lot too, and the question I have is – has there ever been a visionary who made his way to the top of the corporate ladder of ANY company, however enlightened? Would love to hear about it.
  - aexis 10y ago
    I think Satya Nadella, his vision has turned Microsoft around completely from a dull company to a company with vision for the future.
    - bamurphymac1 10y ago
      This makes me think of a sort of pendulum. Maybe what Apple needs now is to just be boring for a decade.
    - sah2ed 10y ago
      I think you give Satya Nadella too much credit. Steve Ballmer laid much of the ground work. Ballmer granted an interview to Bloomberg where he gave some candid answers [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-ballmer-says-smartphones-broke-his-relationship-with-bill-gates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-bal...
visakanv 10y ago
> What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve. Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2012: "I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business. So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup. I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn't: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them. Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- massysett 10y ago
  Bezos isn't following the example of Walton, Sears, or Montgomery Ward. Jobs didn't follow the example of Hewlett. Musk isn't following the example of Henry Ford. It would be a huge mistake for any startup to try to become the next Apple by following the example of Jobs. The Jobs worship has got to stop. He was a unique man in a unique historical circumstance. That time is over. Whether the next big thing comes from Apple or from someone else, it's not going to come from someone who is worshipping and trying to follow Jobs.
leoc 10y ago
That doesn't really seem to be so: Scott Forstall was only fired after Jobs had left, while Cook and Ive are not really shrinking violets either. And in fact it seems that some of the missteps of the post-Jobs era, such as the too-early Apple Watch, were the result of Ive's assertiveness. The central problem seems to be two-headed: Jobs' succession plan seems to have been to put in place a Forstall/Ive/Cook trumvirate, but that arrangement went the way of most triumvirates; and to the extent that one person is in charge at Apple, that person (Cook) wasn't a "product guy" in the Jobs era and seems unable or unwilling to take on SJ's role as hands-on product monarch. Add to that Ive's apparent (and fairly understandable) increasing boredom with having to iterate away on the same old core Apple products for another large chunk of his life, combined with his increased political untameability in the post-Jobs era (what will the stock do if he announces his departure?)

Uhhrrr 10y ago

True, but of course the choice was up to Steve Jobs, not Apple. Also, how the hell would you hire "person like Steve" anyway?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
visakanv 10y ago
As Paul Graham said, "So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

wineisfine 10y ago

This is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook). In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.

triangleman 10y ago
How do you figure there has been a "shift" like you said? In 2007 Jobs was using the phrase "post-PC", and by the time he died in 2011, more than half of Apple's revenue was iPhone/iPad/etc. To me it seems that Cook is just continuing the trend.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Precisely. Continuing Steve's vision as best they can imagine it (not well). Don't forget when he used the post-PC phrase he was very clear PCs are still going to be needed and valued. It wasn't supposed to be either-or. Pretty sure in 6 years Jobs would have picked up some new trends, details and directions. Pretty sure we'd not be stuck in some infinte repeat loop. Thinner. Groundhog Day. Repeat.
- wineisfine 10y ago
  The shift is the pure neglect towards the dev community. Something that most likely would not have happened so blatant and fast under Jobs. It is also completely not necessary that making great phones excludes a company from making at least decent upgrade cycles in their computer hardware. Why should one exclude the other?
  - caconym_ 10y ago
    How do you figure "pure neglect"? What are the features you're missing in the current Mac lineup? Which products from other manufacturers make a meaningful improvement on Apple's offering for "devs"?
    - Lio 10y ago
      Well a computer with enough GPU performance to work with VR would be a nice start. Apple don't currently have anything available other than hacking an eGPU set up together. The "current" Mac Pro is over 3 (4?) years old now. Users can't upgrade it because of the proprietary GPU cards and Apple don't seem able to keep it relevant themselves. It's difficult to have a professional relationship with a supplier where the best options for macOS are either a dodgy Hackintosh or a used 2012 Mac Pro with a new GPU.
gutnor 10y ago
Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along. The true value of Steve Jobs is the reality distortion field. That's really was is missing here with the new Mac. All the discutable decisions about the Mac that people complain about are just similar to the trends set under Jobs, the difference is that he would make the people believe that Apple was 100% behind the Mac. There would no need for Jobs to write twice in a month to employee and the press to say that Apple was committed to it. I'm not sure what is missing exactly, but the MBP failed at delivery rather than feature. For example, did Apple really need to can all their Mac related accessories at the same time, building up a negative climate. They could have rebranded the LG monitor. Somehow give the people a hint that Apple is behind the USB-C, not just picking up and leave it up to the third party to sort out. (which is BTW what Apple has always really done, it just seemed handled better) Apple strategy is to keep everything secret until they do a big delivery event. They are utterly bad at delivery since Jobs is gone, and the lengthy secrecy they keep around everything is now not building hype, just building apprehension.
- leoc 10y ago
  > Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along. That's not the case: back in 2001 post-PC thinking was popular too, and Jobs stood out against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI . That's evidently why Jobs was so reluctant to make the iPod work with Windows PCs: his whole plan for the iPod was to have it sell his intended Digital Hub, the Mac. He did eventually come around to post-PC thinking of course, but only quite late: even in the D 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 he and Gates were quite resistant to it.

snowwrestler 10y ago

> What Apple needed was another person like Steve I know--so obvious, right? All they needed was another Steve Jobs. Why didn't they think of that, and just go out and get one? I hear they grow on trees.

bangonkeyboard 10y ago

> What Apple needed was another person like Steve... They had one. Tim fired him.

Apocryphon 10y ago
What makes Forstall so great? If he's truly worthy of that comparison, perhaps Apple should buy him along with Snap; it would be hilarious if Snapchat turned out to be the NeXTSTEP of this generation. Wouldn't Fadell be just as good?
- bangonkeyboard 10y ago
  Scott Forstall combined Steve Jobs's sensibilities and obsessive attention to detail with a deep, working background in software engineering. He championed UI usability and responsiveness, spearheaded accessibility initiatives out of care rather than for PR, and led the OS X, iOS, and Safari teams through arguably their best and most reliable years. Scott Forstall is why the iPhone was the iPhone. Tony Fadell was almost why the iPhone was an iPod.
  - rarepostinlurkr 10y ago
    Scott didn't manage the "macOS" team sorry. Bertrand, Craig & Andreas, not Scott.
illumin8 10y ago
Yes, but Forstall was responsible for skeumorphism across all of iOS, so I'm not certain he really was as visionary as Jobs.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  Not to mention, the Maps fiasco happened under his watch.
  - leonroy 10y ago

Apocryphon 10y ago

Perhaps they should rehire Jean-Louis Gassée. Buy up the remnants of BeOS from Access, just for good measure.

simonh 10y ago

Then you'd expect all the executive team at Spple to be Steve's hand selected Yes Men, a bunch of followers unable to do their own thing. Yet what we hear from people who actually worked for Steve that this isn't how he operated or selected talent at all. He ruthlessly weeded out Yes Men. What you're representing is the caricature of Steve Jobs, but a one dimensional personality like that could never have achieved what he did.

bamurphymac1 10y ago

I've thought about this a lot. Wouldn't Steve have realized this inherent contradiction? Is this an understood reality at the top levels at Apple? That is, does Tim see his role now as maximizing revenue from the current position, with the goal being to hand off a healthier company to a "visionary" successor? My personal answer fluctuates depending on my daily gut feeling about human nature. And how many times sourcekit crashes.

visakanv 10y ago
I think about this a lot too, and the question I have is – has there ever been a visionary who made his way to the top of the corporate ladder of ANY company, however enlightened? Would love to hear about it.
- aexis 10y ago
  I think Satya Nadella, his vision has turned Microsoft around completely from a dull company to a company with vision for the future.
  - bamurphymac1 10y ago
    This makes me think of a sort of pendulum. Maybe what Apple needs now is to just be boring for a decade.
  - sah2ed 10y ago
    I think you give Satya Nadella too much credit. Steve Ballmer laid much of the ground work. Ballmer granted an interview to Bloomberg where he gave some candid answers [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-ballmer-says-smartphones-broke-his-relationship-with-bill-gates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-bal...

visakanv 10y ago

> What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve. Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2012: "I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business. So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup. I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn't: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them. Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

massysett 10y ago
Bezos isn't following the example of Walton, Sears, or Montgomery Ward. Jobs didn't follow the example of Hewlett. Musk isn't following the example of Henry Ford. It would be a huge mistake for any startup to try to become the next Apple by following the example of Jobs. The Jobs worship has got to stop. He was a unique man in a unique historical circumstance. That time is over. Whether the next big thing comes from Apple or from someone else, it's not going to come from someone who is worshipping and trying to follow Jobs.

leoc 10y ago

That doesn't really seem to be so: Scott Forstall was only fired after Jobs had left, while Cook and Ive are not really shrinking violets either. And in fact it seems that some of the missteps of the post-Jobs era, such as the too-early Apple Watch, were the result of Ive's assertiveness. The central problem seems to be two-headed: Jobs' succession plan seems to have been to put in place a Forstall/Ive/Cook trumvirate, but that arrangement went the way of most triumvirates; and to the extent that one person is in charge at Apple, that person (Cook) wasn't a "product guy" in the Jobs era and seems unable or unwilling to take on SJ's role as hands-on product monarch. Add to that Ive's apparent (and fairly understandable) increasing boredom with having to iterate away on the same old core Apple products for another large chunk of his life, combined with his increased political untameability in the post-Jobs era (what will the stock do if he announces his departure?)