7 ms·

Steve Jobs "never had any designs. He has not designed a single project"

173 points by MikeTaylor 16y ago

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
It would seem his opinion only got worse with time: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-and-history-16-feb-1981/ http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an... His mid-90s annotations retract things he thought politic to say in the 80s.
rblion 16y ago
Steve is the 'brave general' that sparked Apple, destroyed it, and rebuilt it again. He may have been a sociopath artist in his 20's but he grew up to be the world's greatest CEO in his 40's and 50's. Just look at the Apple 10 years ago and look at them now.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Hmm, Does building Apple to the level it is now prove he stopped being a sociopath or prove that he was the right sociopath for the right job?
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    See also "The Gervais Principle": http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
  - rblion 16y ago
    Once a sociopath, always a sociopath. However, the Steve running the show today is not the same as the Steve that got kicked out. He certainly would not have been able to execute grand plans like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad without having hundreds of brilliant people working with him and being proud of their work.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      > However, the Steve running the show today is not the same as the Steve that got kicked out. I really don't think that's true. > He certainly would not have been able to execute grand plans like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad without having hundreds of brilliant people working with him and being proud of their work. Most of the Macintosh team did seem proud enough under him (so much so that some followed him to NeXT). He probably learned a lots of stuff inbetween, but the biggest difference is the people he found to work around him. He doesn't seem to have significantly changed himself,
      - rblion 16y ago
        What is your problem with the guy? What evil has he done to you or to Earth?
- masklinn 16y ago
  > Steve is the 'brave general' that sparked Apple, destroyed it When? How? I've always been under the impression that Apple's destruction had followed jobs's ousting. Unless you mean that Jobs destroyed Apple by hiring Sculley? > He may have been a sociopath artist in his 20's but he grew up to be the world's greatest CEO in his 40's and 50's. Just look at the Apple 10 years ago and look at them now. But it's not like the successes of his 40s were built on nothing. Pixar and NeXT didn't spring up from some kind of void in the mid-90s as Jobs reached 40.
  - rblion 16y ago
    His ego destroyed Apple and got him ousted. When reality humbled him, he returned and rebuilt it for the 21st century. NeXT was part of rebuilding Apple. That's how he got back to Apple... Steve was only a benevolent patron to Pixar. He didn't micromanage them or take credit for any of the movies being 'his visions'.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      > His ego destroyed Apple and got him ousted. When reality humbled him, he returned and rebuilt it for the 21st century. I still don't see that. > NeXT was part of rebuilding Apple. That's how he got back to Apple... You do realize that he founded NeXT as he was being thrown out of Apple don't you? > Steve was only a benevolent patron to Pixar. He didn't micromanage them or take credit for any of the movies being 'his visions'. No, but he did understand what it could become and he did become it's patron. That's pretty significant. He's also the one who decided to refocus Pixar from its original business, hardware, to what it is today, a studio, CGI and animation company. And he managed most of the relations with Disney (including the Eisner fallout). Credit for Pixar's work goes to Lasseter and his team, but credit for Pixar existing at all, let alone going from a $5m Lucas Arts team to a $8b Disney subsidiary in 20 years can hardly go to anybody but Jobs.
      - rblion 16y ago
        Dude. I am not trying to fight you with words. NeXT became Steve's parachute. He had a feeling, the board was getting fed up with his ego. Pixar needed a leader, Lucas got divorced. Steve saved the ship... Steve pulled a Buddha. Had everything in his 20's. Lost it all before 30. Rebuilt his life and his work to be a part of human history when he humbled himself. When people look back centuries from now, Steve will be remembered as a hero, not a villain.
philwelch 16y ago
The fact is, the Macintosh was nowhere near completion when Jobs took it over and shepherded it there himself. The whole Raskin/Jobs controversy smells like 30 year old corporate politics, nothing deeper than that. Some potentially relevant folklore.org bits: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Invented_Burrell.txt&characters=Jef%20Raskin&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.txt&characters=Jef%20Raskin&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Note that Jef Raskin actually disputes both those accounts himself in the comments sections.
  - ZachPruckowski 16y ago
    Which just reinforces the "it's 30-year old corporate politics full of 'he-said, she-said'" perception.
masklinn 16y ago
folklore.org paints a pretty interesting picture of Jef Raskin, and one which indicates his words should be carefully weighted and not taken at any more face value than those of Jobs. For instance: > Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. folklore also shows Jobs's contribution very differently than Raskin's own take: > The plan of record for the Macintosh industrial design was still the one conceived by Jef Raskin, which chose a horizontally oriented, lunch-box type shape, with the keyboard folding up into the lid of the computer for easy transportability, kind of like the Osborne I, which we weren't aware of at the time. But Steve had a real passion for industrial design, and he never seriously considered following Jef's recommendations. As well as complete and utter disagreement with what was apparently written by Raskin, behold from ZeroGravitas's link: > The elimination of slots had been dictated by Jobs, however I thought this would hamstring the product. Thus I invented the all-important bus diagnostic port discussed below Whereas on folklore.org: > But Jef Raskin had a very different point of view. He thought that slots were inherently complex, and were one of the obstacles holding back personal computers from reaching a wider audience. He thought that hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn't rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware. His Macintosh vision had Apple cranking out millions of identical, easy to use, low cost appliance computers and since hardware expandability would add significant cost and complexity it was therefore avoided. > Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. > Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much. > Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Steve Jobs having nothing to do with the original Macintosh doesn't imply that Steve Jobs' aesthetic sense didn't result in Apple's resurgence. It might imply that Jobs is not a nice guy but I think even a lot of Apple fans are OK with Jobs being a not-nice-guy-who-gives-them the coolest stuff. I am personally distributed by the cult-like-climate that Apple is described as having but I am also appreciate that Apple is seen as where the best UIs appear. I think having single persons aesthetic control is very important to and we should think about why. My suspicion is that one wouldn't necessarily have to have genius to do this, just a willingness not to accept the usual croft that infects just any large engineering project. Any average user off the street can walk and say "I don't want to do that in five steps, I want to do it in one". The only genius it take here is a willingness to keep attitude even though a team of twenty spent a year deciding that five steps made sense (and their terrible decision happen because the logic of engineering process crept slowly and insidiously into their aesthetic, their idea of what is "OK").
__bjoernd 16y ago
Well, guess what. He finally had success, regardless of what happened decades ago. ;)
aresant 16y ago
Steve may not design the product, but he is the hard-grain sandpaper that gets a design from prototype to best in market. Ars says it best: "On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that's not his superpower . .. He is Apple's übercritic: one man to pare a torrent of creativity and expertise down to a handful of truly great products by picking apart every prototype, challenging every idea, and finding the flaws that no one else can see." http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars/2 http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a... Further reading on this process in action - Steve's take on the Segway design: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-steve-jobs-meets-the-segway/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-ste...
- phjohnst 16y ago
  I actually had dinner with a well-known hedge fund manager a few months ago and while talking about Blackberries and iPhones, he mentioned "that nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs" Sums it up for me pretty well.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    Bill Gates rather puts the lie to that.
    - chadmalik 16y ago
      ...but of course Gates is an ubercritic too and only "appropriated" from the best (Zerox PARC), just like Jobs.
    - wrs 16y ago
      Well, it's a little more subtle than that. Microsoft produced some of the earliest and most important applications for Macintosh (and still does). Bill sent a famous letter advising Jobs to license the Mac OS widely (which was honest advice, based on Bill's later actions). A lot of Microsoft's success relative to Apple is where Apple refused to participate in a market (e.g., OSes for commodity hardware) rather than a pure competitive "bet against".
mkramlich 16y ago
At the end of the article it was revealed that that Raskin quote was made 24 years ago. Whether it was true then or not, it's certainly possible that Jobs has designed, or contributed to the design, of something at Apple in the 24 years since. Just a wee bit of a possibility there.
- MikeTaylor 16y ago
  Actually, that was revealed at the beginning of the article: "It was published in 1986".
- philwelch 16y ago
  As I pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635161 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635161), Jobs indeed designed some of the architectural features of Apple Stores.
alanh 16y ago
Title is hardly a surprise. What did you expect? Will we next learn he never implemented a single NS_* class?
- danilocampos 16y ago
  JOBS CREATED INTERFACE BUILDER IN 20,000 LINES OF ASSEMBLY HOW DARE YOU He also wrote the entirety of the NeXTSTEP developer docs on scrolls in his kitchen. Despite the abstract level where Jobs usually lives, it's interesting to note just what a hardon he had for OOP back in the day: "With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution." http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/jobs_rs1994/jobs.html http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/jobs_rs1994/jobs.html With his usual flair, he almost implies in the quote that NeXT invented OOP altogether. Jobs seems to have a nose for the things that matter. Especially meaningful stuff that would escape most traditional business guys.
  - ciupicri 16y ago
    According to Wikipedia[1] Inteface Builder was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder#History
    - jonhendry 16y ago
      Hell, it was probably originally in French, too.
      - ciupicri 16y ago
        Only the functional specifications.
aswanson 16y ago
Wozniak's all-planet engineering skill and user empathy is the cornerstone of everything that came afterward. To this day I cannot understand why the prototypical managerial leech that is Jobs, however good his taste, is venerated over Woz. By technical folk, of all people.
- dugmartin 16y ago
  Amen brother.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  The figurehead gets the glory. As a RULE. Lance Armstrong is the Man Who Went to the Moon. We remember him, Buzz Aldrin, and the Presidents who got us there. Nobody else- not a one of the architects and engineers or anybody else.
  - maxawaytoolong 16y ago
    Lance Armstrong rode his bike to the moon?
    - rikthevik 16y ago
      It looked a lot like that scene from E.T.
  - redcap 16y ago
    And more pointedly, who remembers the name of the astronaught who stayed up in the command module? I think his name was Collins, but I was a science/history buff as a kid. I can't even remember his first name.
    - die_sekte 16y ago
      Michael Collins. One of the loneliest humans in history. Apparently some other command module astronaut was a bit farther away from any other human than Collins, but I can't find a good source for that.
beefman 16y ago
The Mac was an improved version of the Lisa, which was a copy of the Xerox Alto, which was inspired by Englebart's NLS. You can see what it would have been had Raskin carried out his plans, because he did, to something called the Canon Cat: http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m Raskin has a better claim to the iOS design, in that it is an "incredible morphing computer".
- CERTIORARI 16y ago
  Expanded url: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3953309968260107254# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3953309968260107254...
- jon_hendry 16y ago
  Ah, yes, the Canon Cat. A real world-changer, that.
  - beefman 16y ago
    Yes, too bad. It looks far superior to what I'm typing in now.
    - kragen 16y ago
      You know, if you wanted to implement a Canon Cat, you could probably do it pretty easily and on a reasonable budget with a modern 16-bit or 32-bit microcontroller, an SRAM chip, an SD card, an LCD, the keyboard of your choice, and Lua instead of Forth. Or you could hack up Emacs or something to support LEAP keys and whatnot (maybe you can relabel the Windows key on your keyboard), although that wouldn't give you the instant-turn-on ability. Most of the detailed specs were available on the web for a while under the name "The Humane Environment".
othello 16y ago
Woz' interview in Founders At Work seems to confirm that Jobs played a major part in many design decisions on the initial Macintosh, especially the removal of extension slots: We had a real argument over slots. (...) Steve said, "All people really need is a printer and a modem." And that was just false because he'd come from a different world than I. (...) He wanted just one slot for a printer and one for a modem(...), so I said, "If you want 2 slots, get another computer." That was the only time we had a real argument. http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
foobarfoofoofoo 16y ago
"He has not designed a single project" is a bit of a strawman argument. What Jobs does is focus a team of designers and engineers on creating a product that is really satisfying to use. It doesn't sound like much, but if it's easy, how come no company but Apple seems to be able to do it? Anyway here is a Mac application that applies some of Jef Raskin's ideas to a finder alternative: http://www.raskinformac.com/ http://www.raskinformac.com/
- euccastro 16y ago
  Raskin said that as a response to Jobs' claim that (quoting from memory) "I feel I still have a couple good designs in me." It's unfortunate that the article omits this bit of context from the original interview in Programmers at Work. He's not saying that Jobs is without merit, just that he steals credit from those to whom it rightfully belongs.
tvon 16y ago
FWIW, Paul Lutus is calling this accurate over on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daabf/steve_jobs_never_had_any_designs_he_has_not/c0yq1lf http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daabf/steve_job...
jasonspalace 16y ago
regardless of the truth it appears it's never too late to change and get better at what we do.
luckydev 16y ago
Steve jobs need not do it. He provides the vision, his engineers design his vision into a product and he sells it . period.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
audionerd 16y ago
“[..] The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc. Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve's design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.” via: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

173 points by MikeTaylor 16y ago

It would seem his opinion only got worse with time: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-and-history-16-feb-1981/ http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an... His mid-90s annotations retract things he thought politic to say in the 80s.

rblion 16y ago

Steve is the 'brave general' that sparked Apple, destroyed it, and rebuilt it again. He may have been a sociopath artist in his 20's but he grew up to be the world's greatest CEO in his 40's and 50's. Just look at the Apple 10 years ago and look at them now.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Hmm, Does building Apple to the level it is now prove he stopped being a sociopath or prove that he was the right sociopath for the right job?
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  See also "The Gervais Principle": http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
- rblion 16y ago
  Once a sociopath, always a sociopath. However, the Steve running the show today is not the same as the Steve that got kicked out. He certainly would not have been able to execute grand plans like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad without having hundreds of brilliant people working with him and being proud of their work.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    > However, the Steve running the show today is not the same as the Steve that got kicked out. I really don't think that's true. > He certainly would not have been able to execute grand plans like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad without having hundreds of brilliant people working with him and being proud of their work. Most of the Macintosh team did seem proud enough under him (so much so that some followed him to NeXT). He probably learned a lots of stuff inbetween, but the biggest difference is the people he found to work around him. He doesn't seem to have significantly changed himself,
    - rblion 16y ago
      What is your problem with the guy? What evil has he done to you or to Earth?
masklinn 16y ago
> Steve is the 'brave general' that sparked Apple, destroyed it When? How? I've always been under the impression that Apple's destruction had followed jobs's ousting. Unless you mean that Jobs destroyed Apple by hiring Sculley? > He may have been a sociopath artist in his 20's but he grew up to be the world's greatest CEO in his 40's and 50's. Just look at the Apple 10 years ago and look at them now. But it's not like the successes of his 40s were built on nothing. Pixar and NeXT didn't spring up from some kind of void in the mid-90s as Jobs reached 40.
- rblion 16y ago
  His ego destroyed Apple and got him ousted. When reality humbled him, he returned and rebuilt it for the 21st century. NeXT was part of rebuilding Apple. That's how he got back to Apple... Steve was only a benevolent patron to Pixar. He didn't micromanage them or take credit for any of the movies being 'his visions'.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    > His ego destroyed Apple and got him ousted. When reality humbled him, he returned and rebuilt it for the 21st century. I still don't see that. > NeXT was part of rebuilding Apple. That's how he got back to Apple... You do realize that he founded NeXT as he was being thrown out of Apple don't you? > Steve was only a benevolent patron to Pixar. He didn't micromanage them or take credit for any of the movies being 'his visions'. No, but he did understand what it could become and he did become it's patron. That's pretty significant. He's also the one who decided to refocus Pixar from its original business, hardware, to what it is today, a studio, CGI and animation company. And he managed most of the relations with Disney (including the Eisner fallout). Credit for Pixar's work goes to Lasseter and his team, but credit for Pixar existing at all, let alone going from a $5m Lucas Arts team to a $8b Disney subsidiary in 20 years can hardly go to anybody but Jobs.
    - rblion 16y ago
      Dude. I am not trying to fight you with words. NeXT became Steve's parachute. He had a feeling, the board was getting fed up with his ego. Pixar needed a leader, Lucas got divorced. Steve saved the ship... Steve pulled a Buddha. Had everything in his 20's. Lost it all before 30. Rebuilt his life and his work to be a part of human history when he humbled himself. When people look back centuries from now, Steve will be remembered as a hero, not a villain.

philwelch 16y ago

The fact is, the Macintosh was nowhere near completion when Jobs took it over and shepherded it there himself. The whole Raskin/Jobs controversy smells like 30 year old corporate politics, nothing deeper than that. Some potentially relevant folklore.org bits: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Invented_Burrell.txt&characters=Jef%20Raskin&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.txt&characters=Jef%20Raskin&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
Note that Jef Raskin actually disputes both those accounts himself in the comments sections.
- ZachPruckowski 16y ago
  Which just reinforces the "it's 30-year old corporate politics full of 'he-said, she-said'" perception.

masklinn 16y ago

folklore.org paints a pretty interesting picture of Jef Raskin, and one which indicates his words should be carefully weighted and not taken at any more face value than those of Jobs. For instance: > Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. folklore also shows Jobs's contribution very differently than Raskin's own take: > The plan of record for the Macintosh industrial design was still the one conceived by Jef Raskin, which chose a horizontally oriented, lunch-box type shape, with the keyboard folding up into the lid of the computer for easy transportability, kind of like the Osborne I, which we weren't aware of at the time. But Steve had a real passion for industrial design, and he never seriously considered following Jef's recommendations. As well as complete and utter disagreement with what was apparently written by Raskin, behold from ZeroGravitas's link: > The elimination of slots had been dictated by Jobs, however I thought this would hamstring the product. Thus I invented the all-important bus diagnostic port discussed below Whereas on folklore.org: > But Jef Raskin had a very different point of view. He thought that slots were inherently complex, and were one of the obstacles holding back personal computers from reaching a wider audience. He thought that hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn't rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware. His Macintosh vision had Apple cranking out millions of identical, easy to use, low cost appliance computers and since hardware expandability would add significant cost and complexity it was therefore avoided. > Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. > Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much. > Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Steve Jobs having nothing to do with the original Macintosh doesn't imply that Steve Jobs' aesthetic sense didn't result in Apple's resurgence. It might imply that Jobs is not a nice guy but I think even a lot of Apple fans are OK with Jobs being a not-nice-guy-who-gives-them the coolest stuff. I am personally distributed by the cult-like-climate that Apple is described as having but I am also appreciate that Apple is seen as where the best UIs appear. I think having single persons aesthetic control is very important to and we should think about why. My suspicion is that one wouldn't necessarily have to have genius to do this, just a willingness not to accept the usual croft that infects just any large engineering project. Any average user off the street can walk and say "I don't want to do that in five steps, I want to do it in one". The only genius it take here is a willingness to keep attitude even though a team of twenty spent a year deciding that five steps made sense (and their terrible decision happen because the logic of engineering process crept slowly and insidiously into their aesthetic, their idea of what is "OK").

__bjoernd 16y ago

Well, guess what. He finally had success, regardless of what happened decades ago. ;)

aresant 16y ago

Steve may not design the product, but he is the hard-grain sandpaper that gets a design from prototype to best in market. Ars says it best: "On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that's not his superpower . .. He is Apple's übercritic: one man to pare a torrent of creativity and expertise down to a handful of truly great products by picking apart every prototype, challenging every idea, and finding the flaws that no one else can see." http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars/2 http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a... Further reading on this process in action - Steve's take on the Segway design: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-steve-jobs-meets-the-segway/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-ste...

phjohnst 16y ago
I actually had dinner with a well-known hedge fund manager a few months ago and while talking about Blackberries and iPhones, he mentioned "that nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs" Sums it up for me pretty well.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  Bill Gates rather puts the lie to that.
  - chadmalik 16y ago
    ...but of course Gates is an ubercritic too and only "appropriated" from the best (Zerox PARC), just like Jobs.
  - wrs 16y ago
    Well, it's a little more subtle than that. Microsoft produced some of the earliest and most important applications for Macintosh (and still does). Bill sent a famous letter advising Jobs to license the Mac OS widely (which was honest advice, based on Bill's later actions). A lot of Microsoft's success relative to Apple is where Apple refused to participate in a market (e.g., OSes for commodity hardware) rather than a pure competitive "bet against".

mkramlich 16y ago

At the end of the article it was revealed that that Raskin quote was made 24 years ago. Whether it was true then or not, it's certainly possible that Jobs has designed, or contributed to the design, of something at Apple in the 24 years since. Just a wee bit of a possibility there.

MikeTaylor 16y ago
Actually, that was revealed at the beginning of the article: "It was published in 1986".
philwelch 16y ago
As I pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635161 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635161), Jobs indeed designed some of the architectural features of Apple Stores.

alanh 16y ago

Title is hardly a surprise. What did you expect? Will we next learn he never implemented a single NS_* class?

danilocampos 16y ago
JOBS CREATED INTERFACE BUILDER IN 20,000 LINES OF ASSEMBLY HOW DARE YOU He also wrote the entirety of the NeXTSTEP developer docs on scrolls in his kitchen. Despite the abstract level where Jobs usually lives, it's interesting to note just what a hardon he had for OOP back in the day: "With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution." http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/jobs_rs1994/jobs.html http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/jobs_rs1994/jobs.html With his usual flair, he almost implies in the quote that NeXT invented OOP altogether. Jobs seems to have a nose for the things that matter. Especially meaningful stuff that would escape most traditional business guys.
- ciupicri 16y ago
  According to Wikipedia[1] Inteface Builder was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder#History
  - jonhendry 16y ago
    Hell, it was probably originally in French, too.
    - ciupicri 16y ago
      Only the functional specifications.

aswanson 16y ago

Wozniak's all-planet engineering skill and user empathy is the cornerstone of everything that came afterward. To this day I cannot understand why the prototypical managerial leech that is Jobs, however good his taste, is venerated over Woz. By technical folk, of all people.

dugmartin 16y ago
Amen brother.
sliverstorm 16y ago
The figurehead gets the glory. As a RULE. Lance Armstrong is the Man Who Went to the Moon. We remember him, Buzz Aldrin, and the Presidents who got us there. Nobody else- not a one of the architects and engineers or anybody else.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  Lance Armstrong rode his bike to the moon?
  - rikthevik 16y ago
    It looked a lot like that scene from E.T.
- redcap 16y ago
  And more pointedly, who remembers the name of the astronaught who stayed up in the command module? I think his name was Collins, but I was a science/history buff as a kid. I can't even remember his first name.
  - die_sekte 16y ago
    Michael Collins. One of the loneliest humans in history. Apparently some other command module astronaut was a bit farther away from any other human than Collins, but I can't find a good source for that.

beefman 16y ago

The Mac was an improved version of the Lisa, which was a copy of the Xerox Alto, which was inspired by Englebart's NLS. You can see what it would have been had Raskin carried out his plans, because he did, to something called the Canon Cat: http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m Raskin has a better claim to the iOS design, in that it is an "incredible morphing computer".

CERTIORARI 16y ago
Expanded url: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3953309968260107254# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3953309968260107254...
jon_hendry 16y ago
Ah, yes, the Canon Cat. A real world-changer, that.
- beefman 16y ago
  Yes, too bad. It looks far superior to what I'm typing in now.
  - kragen 16y ago
    You know, if you wanted to implement a Canon Cat, you could probably do it pretty easily and on a reasonable budget with a modern 16-bit or 32-bit microcontroller, an SRAM chip, an SD card, an LCD, the keyboard of your choice, and Lua instead of Forth. Or you could hack up Emacs or something to support LEAP keys and whatnot (maybe you can relabel the Windows key on your keyboard), although that wouldn't give you the instant-turn-on ability. Most of the detailed specs were available on the web for a while under the name "The Humane Environment".

othello 16y ago

Woz' interview in Founders At Work seems to confirm that Jobs played a major part in many design decisions on the initial Macintosh, especially the removal of extension slots: We had a real argument over slots. (...) Steve said, "All people really need is a printer and a modem." And that was just false because he'd come from a different world than I. (...) He wanted just one slot for a printer and one for a modem(...), so I said, "If you want 2 slots, get another computer." That was the only time we had a real argument. http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

foobarfoofoofoo 16y ago

"He has not designed a single project" is a bit of a strawman argument. What Jobs does is focus a team of designers and engineers on creating a product that is really satisfying to use. It doesn't sound like much, but if it's easy, how come no company but Apple seems to be able to do it? Anyway here is a Mac application that applies some of Jef Raskin's ideas to a finder alternative: http://www.raskinformac.com/ http://www.raskinformac.com/

euccastro 16y ago
Raskin said that as a response to Jobs' claim that (quoting from memory) "I feel I still have a couple good designs in me." It's unfortunate that the article omits this bit of context from the original interview in Programmers at Work. He's not saying that Jobs is without merit, just that he steals credit from those to whom it rightfully belongs.

tvon 16y ago

FWIW, Paul Lutus is calling this accurate over on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daabf/steve_jobs_never_had_any_designs_he_has_not/c0yq1lf http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daabf/steve_job...

jasonspalace 16y ago

regardless of the truth it appears it's never too late to change and get better at what we do.

luckydev 16y ago

Steve jobs need not do it. He provides the vision, his engineers design his vision into a product and he sells it . period.

deleted 16y ago

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audionerd 16y ago

“[..] The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc. Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve's design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.” via: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...