5 ms·

I’m very curious about a few things - how does someone like Steve gain so much respect from so many different types of people? Was it the ‘we’ve won before with

I’m very curious about a few things - how does someone like Steve gain so much respect from so many different types of people? Was it the ‘we’ve won before with him, so I must believe’? - a Nick Saban like persona. Or was it that he was unbelievably empathetic? — that doesn’t make sense, because not all empaths are able to rally people to a cause due to the bleeding heart syndrome. I ask because it is almost as if you see the bricks change shape at Apple trying to fill the missing piece... they know they need that influence, it’s just not there, and honestly, I want to be a part of an organization that operates in the post-kicked out Steve aura.

cletus 5y ago
> how does someone like Steve gain so much respect from so many different types of people? Simple. Steve is undeniably one of the most influential people in the last 50 years. You don't have to agree with him to recognize this. To dismiss his impact because you don't like him personally is shallow and reductive. No one is saying he was a nice guy. First, he and Woz brought us the Mac. Sure, Woz was the tech guy but Steve's product influence cannot be overstated. Macs really lost out to the IBM PC and then Steve was forced out of his own company by his own hire (John Sculley from Pepsi). Apple languished for a decade while Steve started NeXT. On the brink of bankruptcy when Apple had to be rescued by a $150 million injection of funds from Microsoft. In the next decade, Steve took the NeXT OS that because the foundation for OS X and iOS and released the iPod, iTunes and then the iPhone that ultimately turned Apple into what it is today: a trillion dollar company that literally prints money. Steve was basically the ultimate product person and really a visionary. It was often stated that he generated a reality distortion field as he literally changed industries around him. The sea change that was the iPhone took control over code distribution on mobile phones from the wireless carriers. The price of this was several years of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the US. The popularity of the iPhone bent carriers to his will. He unrelentingly refused to ship bloatware on the iPhone (unlike what you get on basically very Android phone other than the Pixel). Apple developed a track record for taking terrible technologies and making them great. One of my personal favourite examples is connecting to Wifi. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember this but in the early 2000s that involved going to a settings window in Windows and entering the Wifi type (802.11b and then 11g), the encryption type (eg WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 or WPA2-PSK) and an encryption key, which may or may not be a password. On OSX you simply selected a network and entered a password. Why ask the user for a bunch of stuff they don't care about, probably don't know and you, the computer, can figure out? To me this is classic Steve influence. Fun fact: Steve is the reason we don't have DRM on downloaded music. iTunes initially used a DRMed format to launch and all songs were $0.99. DRM was demanded by the RIAA. The RIAA didn't like the pricing model. Steve ultimately made the bargain that gave them pricing tiers but his demand was no DRM. That's how iTunes ended up distributing DRM-less MP3s instead. Steve was by far the most user-focused of any of the tech titans of the last half-century. Some people don't like Apple's walled gardens and that's fine but again, to dismiss the impact of the iPhone (for example) because you personally prefer the "freedom" of Android is a shallow judgement. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Steve was a giant. That's why he was and continues to be respected.
- emteycz 5y ago
  <OS flamewar> Not sure about Windows 2000, but connecting to wifi on Windows XP took a single double-click... and I believe OSX Tiger was released years after XP. </OS flamewar>
  - collinmanderson 5y ago
    Was that true before Service Pack 2? I suppose SP2 was still 6 months before Tiger in any case.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      You're probably right.
diskzero 5y ago
This is such a difficult and interesting question to try and answer. Of course, I can only offer my viewpoint as someone who worked for (with?) him in four different contexts. He was most definitely not empathetic to me. He could be very empathetic to an abstract construct of a person. He would act as an advocate of the "user" but I felt that the user was always him. How did this align with reality? I guess it did, to a certain cross-section of people who appreciated whatever guise of a user Steve represented. This user construct changed over time and I could see it in early Apple Steve, lost in the wilderness Steve, NeXT Steve and return to Apple Steve. Steve had charisma. Younger Steve charisma was different to me and it left an imprint. I felt that he was attractive physically and mentally, could engage with you and make you feel like you and he were doing something that could really make a difference. We knew we weren't curing cancer, but that somehow the pursuit was noble in a similar way; enabling human potential that was being lost. I still want to feel this way about technology. Once you got to know Steve (if one could) he was oddly two-dimensional. His lack of real personal connection or concern about you as an individual was troubling. In some ways, the more abusive he was to you, the more it showed his interest in you. It was dysfunctional. He was never mean to random people (in my observance) although you hear stories of him being abusive to people he didn't know, I never saw it. I saw him open doors for people, let people cut in line in front of him in the salad bar, normal sorts of politeness. The higher his expectation of you, the harsher the abuse you could expect to receive. You could never really become numb to it, but after awhile you just began to adjust your calibration. As you point out, Steve did win quite a bit. Of course he lost and sometimes he lost big. I really didn't care about winning the way a lot of Silicon Valley people care and I saw some of this in how Steve lived his life. Yes, he drove a nice car and had some property. But he wore well-worn clothes, drove himself to work and generally seemed like one of us. Later in life, odd things like private jets, yachts and Central Park condos showed up. Everyone that I worked with at Apple who is still there knows it is not the same company. It can't be. The scale, management structure, market, political climate and more is different. And there is no Steve. I left Apple when Steve finally left, but I knew that "my" Apple was gone around 2006.
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  All I can say is thank you for pouring this out into the ether, these attributes and recollections are beautiful, or dysfunctionally beautiful you could say.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I'm late to the discussion. And I don't have near the personal insight to offer that @diskzero does. But I think there's another aspect as well. Apple came back. I can think of no other company in recent history that has come back from such a long run on death row to periodically become the company with the world's highest market valuation. And we tend to associate that (for many good reasons) with Steve Jobs. Steve's persona and the admiration that follows I think derives in large part because it has been the ultimate come back story. This "come back story" is one of the most classic and inspiring stories that has resonated through myth and fable throughout history. It's what makes us stand up and cheer in a theater when Daniel Laruso delivers the take down kick. It is Miracle when the US beats USSR in hockey. It's why we like to interpret David and Goliath as a little guy takes down big guy story (vs the kid with the rock gun kills the big lout https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...). It's interesting to note that with Steve gone, Elon Musk has risen to the new Crazy Successful Celebrity Leader figure. Like Steve, you can see Elon from a variety of facets, some very flattering, and some very damning, what we would love about him is that he has had some success at defeating the status quo.
- diskzero 5y ago
  The comeback was amazing, wasn't it? It was cool to be there and I think about the dynamics a lot. What I really keep trying to figure out is how we were so effective with such small team sizes and why this can't scale. When I was at Amazon, the mobile application team three times larger than the OS X engineering team circa 2001.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

cletus 5y ago

> how does someone like Steve gain so much respect from so many different types of people? Simple. Steve is undeniably one of the most influential people in the last 50 years. You don't have to agree with him to recognize this. To dismiss his impact because you don't like him personally is shallow and reductive. No one is saying he was a nice guy. First, he and Woz brought us the Mac. Sure, Woz was the tech guy but Steve's product influence cannot be overstated. Macs really lost out to the IBM PC and then Steve was forced out of his own company by his own hire (John Sculley from Pepsi). Apple languished for a decade while Steve started NeXT. On the brink of bankruptcy when Apple had to be rescued by a $150 million injection of funds from Microsoft. In the next decade, Steve took the NeXT OS that because the foundation for OS X and iOS and released the iPod, iTunes and then the iPhone that ultimately turned Apple into what it is today: a trillion dollar company that literally prints money. Steve was basically the ultimate product person and really a visionary. It was often stated that he generated a reality distortion field as he literally changed industries around him. The sea change that was the iPhone took control over code distribution on mobile phones from the wireless carriers. The price of this was several years of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the US. The popularity of the iPhone bent carriers to his will. He unrelentingly refused to ship bloatware on the iPhone (unlike what you get on basically very Android phone other than the Pixel). Apple developed a track record for taking terrible technologies and making them great. One of my personal favourite examples is connecting to Wifi. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember this but in the early 2000s that involved going to a settings window in Windows and entering the Wifi type (802.11b and then 11g), the encryption type (eg WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 or WPA2-PSK) and an encryption key, which may or may not be a password. On OSX you simply selected a network and entered a password. Why ask the user for a bunch of stuff they don't care about, probably don't know and you, the computer, can figure out? To me this is classic Steve influence. Fun fact: Steve is the reason we don't have DRM on downloaded music. iTunes initially used a DRMed format to launch and all songs were $0.99. DRM was demanded by the RIAA. The RIAA didn't like the pricing model. Steve ultimately made the bargain that gave them pricing tiers but his demand was no DRM. That's how iTunes ended up distributing DRM-less MP3s instead. Steve was by far the most user-focused of any of the tech titans of the last half-century. Some people don't like Apple's walled gardens and that's fine but again, to dismiss the impact of the iPhone (for example) because you personally prefer the "freedom" of Android is a shallow judgement. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Steve was a giant. That's why he was and continues to be respected.

emteycz 5y ago
<OS flamewar> Not sure about Windows 2000, but connecting to wifi on Windows XP took a single double-click... and I believe OSX Tiger was released years after XP. </OS flamewar>
- collinmanderson 5y ago
  Was that true before Service Pack 2? I suppose SP2 was still 6 months before Tiger in any case.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    You're probably right.

diskzero 5y ago

This is such a difficult and interesting question to try and answer. Of course, I can only offer my viewpoint as someone who worked for (with?) him in four different contexts. He was most definitely not empathetic to me. He could be very empathetic to an abstract construct of a person. He would act as an advocate of the "user" but I felt that the user was always him. How did this align with reality? I guess it did, to a certain cross-section of people who appreciated whatever guise of a user Steve represented. This user construct changed over time and I could see it in early Apple Steve, lost in the wilderness Steve, NeXT Steve and return to Apple Steve. Steve had charisma. Younger Steve charisma was different to me and it left an imprint. I felt that he was attractive physically and mentally, could engage with you and make you feel like you and he were doing something that could really make a difference. We knew we weren't curing cancer, but that somehow the pursuit was noble in a similar way; enabling human potential that was being lost. I still want to feel this way about technology. Once you got to know Steve (if one could) he was oddly two-dimensional. His lack of real personal connection or concern about you as an individual was troubling. In some ways, the more abusive he was to you, the more it showed his interest in you. It was dysfunctional. He was never mean to random people (in my observance) although you hear stories of him being abusive to people he didn't know, I never saw it. I saw him open doors for people, let people cut in line in front of him in the salad bar, normal sorts of politeness. The higher his expectation of you, the harsher the abuse you could expect to receive. You could never really become numb to it, but after awhile you just began to adjust your calibration. As you point out, Steve did win quite a bit. Of course he lost and sometimes he lost big. I really didn't care about winning the way a lot of Silicon Valley people care and I saw some of this in how Steve lived his life. Yes, he drove a nice car and had some property. But he wore well-worn clothes, drove himself to work and generally seemed like one of us. Later in life, odd things like private jets, yachts and Central Park condos showed up. Everyone that I worked with at Apple who is still there knows it is not the same company. It can't be. The scale, management structure, market, political climate and more is different. And there is no Steve. I left Apple when Steve finally left, but I knew that "my" Apple was gone around 2006.

anonymouse008 5y ago
All I can say is thank you for pouring this out into the ether, these attributes and recollections are beautiful, or dysfunctionally beautiful you could say.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I'm late to the discussion. And I don't have near the personal insight to offer that @diskzero does. But I think there's another aspect as well. Apple came back. I can think of no other company in recent history that has come back from such a long run on death row to periodically become the company with the world's highest market valuation. And we tend to associate that (for many good reasons) with Steve Jobs. Steve's persona and the admiration that follows I think derives in large part because it has been the ultimate come back story. This "come back story" is one of the most classic and inspiring stories that has resonated through myth and fable throughout history. It's what makes us stand up and cheer in a theater when Daniel Laruso delivers the take down kick. It is Miracle when the US beats USSR in hockey. It's why we like to interpret David and Goliath as a little guy takes down big guy story (vs the kid with the rock gun kills the big lout https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...). It's interesting to note that with Steve gone, Elon Musk has risen to the new Crazy Successful Celebrity Leader figure. Like Steve, you can see Elon from a variety of facets, some very flattering, and some very damning, what we would love about him is that he has had some success at defeating the status quo.

diskzero 5y ago
The comeback was amazing, wasn't it? It was cool to be there and I think about the dynamics a lot. What I really keep trying to figure out is how we were so effective with such small team sizes and why this can't scale. When I was at Amazon, the mobile application team three times larger than the OS X engineering team circa 2001.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...