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Best part is Job's last comment: By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motiva

by krav 16y ago

Best part is Job's last comment: By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations? Creating something of value is hard. It takes dedication, iteration, consistent work, focus, and sacrifice. And to do it again and again? Rare. Apple - regardless of motivation - has done that under Jobs. The sales show the result. I'd respect him, a doer, above a talker like Gawker any day.

jarek 16y ago
Without expressing an opinion about the value of Apple products, I would be careful about implying a causation between a product's sales and its value or "greatness".
- krav 16y ago
  Fair enough - I was going for an "unbiased" metric. Could have been market cap, stock price, etc. In a nutshell, my respect goes to the builders and hackers of the world, not the talkers.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Sounds like you're saying your respect goes to the businessmen and marketers of the world, if your primary criteria for greatness are sales, market cap, stock price, etc. Those might sometimes correlate with creativity and technical merit, but they certainly aren't directly measures of it (and often don't correlate). To put it differently: What has Jobs made in the past 10 years? I don't mean: what have employees over which he's had supervision as CEO made. What has Jobs made? Is he really a "builder and hacker"? My impression of the early days is that he wasn't even then: Woz was the builder and hacker; Jobs was the suit.
    - krav 16y ago
      The ceo of a company is responsible for success and failure. When I was in the Army, the success or failure of my squad rested with me - I was ultimately responsible. So, yes, in this case, the guy who took apple from the dumps to one of the biggest consumer devices companies in the world, he gets credit.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done. CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did. And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.
        pohl 16y ago
        I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.
        _delirium 16y ago
        I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though). I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.
  - jarek 16y ago
    Those unbiased metrics are a good measure of the entirety of a company's or a division's performance, but they tell us little about the product itself in absence of consideration of its marketing, competition, relevant social attitudes, and a plethora of other market factors which to a large degree determine the "success" of a product. Agreed on more respect for the creators than for the talkers, though.
ajscherer 16y ago
That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.
- pak 16y ago
  The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me. Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.
- clawrencewenham 16y ago
  Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product. His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates. Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    > "You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is." This is a fairly standard "engineering" view of the world. It is also why 90% of startups go out of business. > "The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd." That is one alternative, but certainly not the only alternative. You could also get out and talk to your potential customers, find out what their problems are and what it would take to solve them, then build what THEY think is right. The nice side effect is you'll already know who the consumer is. As a customer, I do have a stake in something when I put down my credit card. If a company doesn't respect me as their customer, you bet I will not be repeating my business. However, the business can (and SHOULD) decide if they want me as a customer. If they don't, they should make it clear. I think Apple does this very well: You are given the Apple sandbox that is very well defined. If you don't like it, don't buy Apple (yet, people still do, then bitch forever about it).
wushupork 16y ago
I totally agree with you. That seemed to shut up the Gawker blogger. You can't please everybody and it isn't worth trying. And if you try to, you end up with a crappy product nobody wants and it's so far from your vision of what it should be. It takes guts to do what Jobs does. He's not doing this to be Mr Popular. Despite what you may think of Jobs, he's pulled his company from horrible performance and has created value over and over. Anybody can talk smack and criticize. It takes will, dedication and passion do create.
elblanco 16y ago
> By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations? Yes, let's hi-light and praise what's probably one of the most absolute jerkiest part of the exchange. You don't have to make something popular to do something great. And no matter how great Jobs thinks he is, he didn't personally create most of the things Apple puts out -- the team of dedicated employees at Apple did. Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same.
- neonfunk 16y ago
  "no matter how great Jobs thinks he is"... "Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same"... I didn't read that Jobs thinks he's great or that his employees are stupid.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Then why would he say it? The implication that he thinks he's done something great is clear (not saying that he hasn't done great things, but the semantics of his statement are clear, "go away guy who hasn't made billions of dollars and come back when your bank account is full").
    - neonfunk 16y ago
      I didn't read anything about the relation between greatness and bank accounts. It seems like you want to paint him according to your existing preconceptions. I read, "I really do take this stuff to heart, and you're telling me I'm just in it for the money.". I'd probably fire back something similar at 2 am (and regret it in the morning).
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
I thought Steve Jobs main role at Apple was to "criticize others' work and belittle their motivations"? Didn't some of the early Apple employee's give him a rubber stamp with "this is shit" carved into it so he wouldn't have to waste time writing his feedback on their work?

by krav 16y ago

jarek 16y ago

Without expressing an opinion about the value of Apple products, I would be careful about implying a causation between a product's sales and its value or "greatness".

krav 16y ago
Fair enough - I was going for an "unbiased" metric. Could have been market cap, stock price, etc. In a nutshell, my respect goes to the builders and hackers of the world, not the talkers.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 16y ago
  Sounds like you're saying your respect goes to the businessmen and marketers of the world, if your primary criteria for greatness are sales, market cap, stock price, etc. Those might sometimes correlate with creativity and technical merit, but they certainly aren't directly measures of it (and often don't correlate). To put it differently: What has Jobs made in the past 10 years? I don't mean: what have employees over which he's had supervision as CEO made. What has Jobs made? Is he really a "builder and hacker"? My impression of the early days is that he wasn't even then: Woz was the builder and hacker; Jobs was the suit.
  - krav 16y ago
    The ceo of a company is responsible for success and failure. When I was in the Army, the success or failure of my squad rested with me - I was ultimately responsible. So, yes, in this case, the guy who took apple from the dumps to one of the biggest consumer devices companies in the world, he gets credit.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done. CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did. And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.
      - pohl 16y ago
        I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.
        _delirium 16y ago
        I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though). I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.
- jarek 16y ago
  Those unbiased metrics are a good measure of the entirety of a company's or a division's performance, but they tell us little about the product itself in absence of consideration of its marketing, competition, relevant social attitudes, and a plethora of other market factors which to a large degree determine the "success" of a product. Agreed on more respect for the creators than for the talkers, though.

ajscherer 16y ago

That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.

pak 16y ago
The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me. Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.
clawrencewenham 16y ago
Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product. His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates. Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  > "You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is." This is a fairly standard "engineering" view of the world. It is also why 90% of startups go out of business. > "The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd." That is one alternative, but certainly not the only alternative. You could also get out and talk to your potential customers, find out what their problems are and what it would take to solve them, then build what THEY think is right. The nice side effect is you'll already know who the consumer is. As a customer, I do have a stake in something when I put down my credit card. If a company doesn't respect me as their customer, you bet I will not be repeating my business. However, the business can (and SHOULD) decide if they want me as a customer. If they don't, they should make it clear. I think Apple does this very well: You are given the Apple sandbox that is very well defined. If you don't like it, don't buy Apple (yet, people still do, then bitch forever about it).

wushupork 16y ago

I totally agree with you. That seemed to shut up the Gawker blogger. You can't please everybody and it isn't worth trying. And if you try to, you end up with a crappy product nobody wants and it's so far from your vision of what it should be. It takes guts to do what Jobs does. He's not doing this to be Mr Popular. Despite what you may think of Jobs, he's pulled his company from horrible performance and has created value over and over. Anybody can talk smack and criticize. It takes will, dedication and passion do create.

elblanco 16y ago

> By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations? Yes, let's hi-light and praise what's probably one of the most absolute jerkiest part of the exchange. You don't have to make something popular to do something great. And no matter how great Jobs thinks he is, he didn't personally create most of the things Apple puts out -- the team of dedicated employees at Apple did. Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same.

neonfunk 16y ago
"no matter how great Jobs thinks he is"... "Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same"... I didn't read that Jobs thinks he's great or that his employees are stupid.
- elblanco 16y ago
  Then why would he say it? The implication that he thinks he's done something great is clear (not saying that he hasn't done great things, but the semantics of his statement are clear, "go away guy who hasn't made billions of dollars and come back when your bank account is full").
  - neonfunk 16y ago
    I didn't read anything about the relation between greatness and bank accounts. It seems like you want to paint him according to your existing preconceptions. I read, "I really do take this stuff to heart, and you're telling me I'm just in it for the money.". I'd probably fire back something similar at 2 am (and regret it in the morning).

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

I thought Steve Jobs main role at Apple was to "criticize others' work and belittle their motivations"? Didn't some of the early Apple employee's give him a rubber stamp with "this is shit" carved into it so he wouldn't have to waste time writing his feedback on their work?