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If Apple was primarily an algorithms company then yes, he'd have been a failure. Apple's relative disinterest in R&D during Jobs' tenure was quite legendary tho

If Apple was primarily an algorithms company then yes, he'd have been a failure. Apple's relative disinterest in R&D during Jobs' tenure was quite legendary though. They were first and foremost a design company. Once they started trying to compete with Google on raw technology grounds like AI, mapping etc, they started to struggle much harder. They were always the strongest in the areas where Jobs can and did override his lieutenants sometimes. The way Apple seemed to be constantly balancing over-design against engineering concerns seems like a case in point. Once Jobs was gone the consensus seems to be that Jony Ive became unrestrained and had nobody above him who could do what he did anymore, so he kind of went a bit wild and then disengaged.

eesmith 7y ago
The thesis is that "the only other responsibility of an executive is to enforce company values." (Note, there's no place where the author said those values need to be 'vague'.) Your example of how 'many buttons a phone should have' could be interpreted as enforcing a specific design value. You ask "Without this kind of decision making how should an organisation ever learn how to translate values into concrete decisions?" I don't see how your question is necessarily incompatible from the thesis. I don't know about the 'what programming languages developers should use'. Is that Pascal (on the Mac), Dylan ("created in the early 1990s by a group led by Apple Computer"), Objective-C, Swift, or something else? I'm guessing Obj-C. What role did he play in choosing that as the language?
- repolfx 7y ago
  Yes, Jobs believed Objective-C was fine and nobody would ever need or want another language. Swift had to wait until Jobs passed away, as he'd have never authorised it otherwise despite lots of people telling him Objective-C was out of date. As for the rest, yes, fair point. Usually in corporate English "values" are very vague indeed, but I suppose you can consider it to be precise.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    I had not heard that Jobs played any important role in the choice to use Objective-C. Looking around now, I can't find corraboration of that. For example, https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-invent-Objective-C https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-invent-Objective-C has one person commenting "I’m not even sure if it was Jobs’s decision to include Objective C with NeXTStep, though he might have had a role in it." This is based on Jobs' seemingly lack of understanding or experience with OO programming. (Other links also offer no pointers about Jobs' involvement.) Now, to be certain, Jobs knew about the decision. He negotiated with Stallman about the licensing for the Objective-C front-end. But that's different than making the decision. Once the decision was made, I could see why he might argue that it's fine. We see, for example, companies which make a decision to only use one or a small handful of languages. He could be using his reality distortion field to keep that decision in place, rather than allowing a large diversity of languages in-house.

eesmith 7y ago

The thesis is that "the only other responsibility of an executive is to enforce company values." (Note, there's no place where the author said those values need to be 'vague'.) Your example of how 'many buttons a phone should have' could be interpreted as enforcing a specific design value. You ask "Without this kind of decision making how should an organisation ever learn how to translate values into concrete decisions?" I don't see how your question is necessarily incompatible from the thesis. I don't know about the 'what programming languages developers should use'. Is that Pascal (on the Mac), Dylan ("created in the early 1990s by a group led by Apple Computer"), Objective-C, Swift, or something else? I'm guessing Obj-C. What role did he play in choosing that as the language?

repolfx 7y ago
Yes, Jobs believed Objective-C was fine and nobody would ever need or want another language. Swift had to wait until Jobs passed away, as he'd have never authorised it otherwise despite lots of people telling him Objective-C was out of date. As for the rest, yes, fair point. Usually in corporate English "values" are very vague indeed, but I suppose you can consider it to be precise.
- eesmith 7y ago
  I had not heard that Jobs played any important role in the choice to use Objective-C. Looking around now, I can't find corraboration of that. For example, https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-invent-Objective-C https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-invent-Objective-C has one person commenting "I’m not even sure if it was Jobs’s decision to include Objective C with NeXTStep, though he might have had a role in it." This is based on Jobs' seemingly lack of understanding or experience with OO programming. (Other links also offer no pointers about Jobs' involvement.) Now, to be certain, Jobs knew about the decision. He negotiated with Stallman about the licensing for the Objective-C front-end. But that's different than making the decision. Once the decision was made, I could see why he might argue that it's fine. We see, for example, companies which make a decision to only use one or a small handful of languages. He could be using his reality distortion field to keep that decision in place, rather than allowing a large diversity of languages in-house.