5 ms·

Being Steve Jobs's Boss

111 points by jgamman 16y ago

andreyf 16y ago
He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind." I'd heard Alan Kay repeat this many times. I don't know of much hard evidence (I'd really appreciate some, if you do), but I have a feeling that Alan Kay and the Smalltalk community was a great inspiration to Steve Jobs and Apple's way of thinking.
- kqr2 16y ago
  Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.
  - andreyf 16y ago
    Right, and it was also mentioned in the article. Alan Kay's essay by the same title is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/old/_A_bicycle_for_the_mind_.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.uni... Some other similarities off the top of my head: Alan Kay also often speaks about "building systems", and both this article and Steve himself talked about Apple's advantage being "good system integration". Objective-C, inspired directly from one of Alan's brain-children, was at the core of the value of NeXT, which Steve started, and is still at the core of all of Apple's developer platforms. I don't know if the two have ever met, but I think they certainly hang out hang out with similar-minded folk... ;)
- bhiggins 16y ago
  Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook That said, Smalltalk is overrated.
  - greendestiny 16y ago
    I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem around the language.
    - bhiggins 16y ago
      Smalltalk is like Libertarianism. It allows for those who find reality too difficult or hard to understand an escape to an ideology that is simple, elegant, and wrong.
  - hboon 16y ago
    Why is it overrated? Edited: grammer.
alanthonyc 16y ago
Link to the actual interview (this article looks like just a rehash): http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566
Locke1689 16y ago
So Intel (INTC) lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola (MOT) with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend $11 billion and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics … and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn't technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation. I'm not confident he's correct. It certainly wasn't the wrong technical decision -- it may have been the wrong business decision.
- andreyf 16y ago
  Thought that, too: good thing he's not CEO anymore, I could just imagine him in a meeting "Why does A4 run RISC? We got burned by that already, we're sticking with CISC this time!"
rradu 16y ago
> People say he killed the Newton- your pet project- out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge? > Probably. He won't talk to me, so I don't know. They still don't talk? After all these years?
- olalonde 16y ago
  This sentence caught me totally off guard. The whole article I felt Sculley (still) had a good relationship with Jobs.
- solutionyogi 16y ago
  Why would you expect Steve to talk to him? In an interview, Steve said, "I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for." [Direct link to the segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-TZ6r9Y&feature=related#t=5m27s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-TZ6r9Y&feature=relat... ] Hear him say the above words, you will feel the pain in his voice. If I was in his place, I would never ever talk to Scully again.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
sunjain 16y ago
As he puts it Apple is foremost a design company. I see interesting rivalry brewing up between Apple and Google. One where design is paramount and other where engineering is paramount. In fact in the tech world, Apple stands out as a design company where as pretty much everybody is more or less engineering and marketing company.
- bluishgreen 16y ago
  Apple can do engineering, Google cannot design.
  - varjag 16y ago
    I remember back in the day http://google.com http://google.com was touted as masterpiece of design.
  - olalonde 16y ago
    I disagree. Chrome, Gmail, Google search, etc. Very broadly, Google's product aren't as minimalist as Apple's because they want to appeal to power users and techies as well as your mom and dad. That doesn't mean they can't design.
nutjob123 16y ago
I thought this was hilarious. "I remember going into Steve's house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed."
- kqr2 16y ago
  Famous photo which captures this: http://www.life2point0.com/images/2007/12/14/stevejobs.jpg http://www.life2point0.com/images/2007/12/14/stevejobs.jpg
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    This looks like a very luxurious crack den, which actually probably isn't too far off. You have to wonder whether, given his LSD use and whatever underlying emotional issues he may have had, how psychologically healthy he was at the time.
- gnosis 16y ago
  "He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed." and a jet, and billions of dollars.. Somehow, I find this "austere" portrait of him quite laughable.
Nekojoe 16y ago
I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception." It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.
shareme 16y ago
I offer a counter to the assumption on page 2 of the article.. Its not User experience in its end-all but reducing R and D costs with right R and D choices that allowed the focus on user experience. Let me explain. Several universities concentrated on Mach Kernel OS design patterns. Thu,s when SJ left Apple he founded NEXT based upon extending this pattern with an OOP C language as the trade-offs with MACH in the OS do not benefit unless you adapt an OOP language to build the apps sitting on top that Mach Kernel OS and to be blunt C++ is a poor OOP computer language. So when NEXT was acquired by Apple they had the opportunity to lower R&D costs as the initial R&D costs for this new way had already been paid by NEXT. Apple in its purchase of NEXT was just securing a price level of R&D for the next 20 years by buying the R&D team. The assumption that Apple started with user experience is somewhat miss-guided and completely wrong. To give you an idea of that initial R&D investment ..how many decades has GNU Hurd been limping along? Exactly..

111 points by jgamman 16y ago

He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind." I'd heard Alan Kay repeat this many times. I don't know of much hard evidence (I'd really appreciate some, if you do), but I have a feeling that Alan Kay and the Smalltalk community was a great inspiration to Steve Jobs and Apple's way of thinking.

kqr2 16y ago
Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.
- andreyf 16y ago
  Right, and it was also mentioned in the article. Alan Kay's essay by the same title is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/old/_A_bicycle_for_the_mind_.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.uni... Some other similarities off the top of my head: Alan Kay also often speaks about "building systems", and both this article and Steve himself talked about Apple's advantage being "good system integration". Objective-C, inspired directly from one of Alan's brain-children, was at the core of the value of NeXT, which Steve started, and is still at the core of all of Apple's developer platforms. I don't know if the two have ever met, but I think they certainly hang out hang out with similar-minded folk... ;)
bhiggins 16y ago
Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook That said, Smalltalk is overrated.
- greendestiny 16y ago
  I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem around the language.
  - bhiggins 16y ago
    Smalltalk is like Libertarianism. It allows for those who find reality too difficult or hard to understand an escape to an ideology that is simple, elegant, and wrong.
- hboon 16y ago
  Why is it overrated? Edited: grammer.

alanthonyc 16y ago

Link to the actual interview (this article looks like just a rehash): http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566

Locke1689 16y ago

So Intel (INTC) lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola (MOT) with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend $11 billion and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics … and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn't technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation. I'm not confident he's correct. It certainly wasn't the wrong technical decision -- it may have been the wrong business decision.

andreyf 16y ago
Thought that, too: good thing he's not CEO anymore, I could just imagine him in a meeting "Why does A4 run RISC? We got burned by that already, we're sticking with CISC this time!"

rradu 16y ago

> People say he killed the Newton- your pet project- out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge? > Probably. He won't talk to me, so I don't know. They still don't talk? After all these years?

olalonde 16y ago
This sentence caught me totally off guard. The whole article I felt Sculley (still) had a good relationship with Jobs.
solutionyogi 16y ago
Why would you expect Steve to talk to him? In an interview, Steve said, "I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for." [Direct link to the segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-TZ6r9Y&feature=related#t=5m27s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-TZ6r9Y&feature=relat... ] Hear him say the above words, you will feel the pain in his voice. If I was in his place, I would never ever talk to Scully again.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

sunjain 16y ago

As he puts it Apple is foremost a design company. I see interesting rivalry brewing up between Apple and Google. One where design is paramount and other where engineering is paramount. In fact in the tech world, Apple stands out as a design company where as pretty much everybody is more or less engineering and marketing company.

bluishgreen 16y ago
Apple can do engineering, Google cannot design.
- varjag 16y ago
  I remember back in the day http://google.com http://google.com was touted as masterpiece of design.
- olalonde 16y ago
  I disagree. Chrome, Gmail, Google search, etc. Very broadly, Google's product aren't as minimalist as Apple's because they want to appeal to power users and techies as well as your mom and dad. That doesn't mean they can't design.

nutjob123 16y ago

I thought this was hilarious. "I remember going into Steve's house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed."

kqr2 16y ago
Famous photo which captures this: http://www.life2point0.com/images/2007/12/14/stevejobs.jpg http://www.life2point0.com/images/2007/12/14/stevejobs.jpg
- Alex3917 16y ago
  This looks like a very luxurious crack den, which actually probably isn't too far off. You have to wonder whether, given his LSD use and whatever underlying emotional issues he may have had, how psychologically healthy he was at the time.
gnosis 16y ago
"He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed." and a jet, and billions of dollars.. Somehow, I find this "austere" portrait of him quite laughable.

Nekojoe 16y ago

I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception." It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.

shareme 16y ago

I offer a counter to the assumption on page 2 of the article.. Its not User experience in its end-all but reducing R and D costs with right R and D choices that allowed the focus on user experience. Let me explain. Several universities concentrated on Mach Kernel OS design patterns. Thu,s when SJ left Apple he founded NEXT based upon extending this pattern with an OOP C language as the trade-offs with MACH in the OS do not benefit unless you adapt an OOP language to build the apps sitting on top that Mach Kernel OS and to be blunt C++ is a poor OOP computer language. So when NEXT was acquired by Apple they had the opportunity to lower R&D costs as the initial R&D costs for this new way had already been paid by NEXT. Apple in its purchase of NEXT was just securing a price level of R&D for the next 20 years by buying the R&D team. The assumption that Apple started with user experience is somewhat miss-guided and completely wrong. To give you an idea of that initial R&D investment ..how many decades has GNU Hurd been limping along? Exactly..