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I disagree, Steve Jobs didn't luck out. Instead, he never went through the filters. Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filte

by mrtksn 5y ago

I disagree, Steve Jobs didn't luck out. Instead, he never went through the filters. Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most. Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers". I think Steve Jobs is an example of it. Even if Steve Jobs said he was competing, Apple rarely competed and won on equal terms under Steve Jobs. He had always maintained a startup mentality, instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. IMHO, his leadership style was exactly what it takes to drive bunch of brilliant people into the jungle where the great riches are hidden but he was no match to Tim Cook as a CEO. To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. It's probably because he was one of those who made what we have today but if you forget that for a moment he sounds like a time traveler from the 2000s explaining the value of computers to regular folks from the 70s. What an extraordinary man.

pavlov 5y ago
I don’t agree with Thiel on a lot of things, but in this instance I do. When someone says “I’m very competitive,” I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people.
- stocknoob 5y ago
  Thanks, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the competitive mindset rubbed me the wrong way. It’s all about seeking external validation in the existing status quo.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I'm on the same boat. Really not fan of him but his speech on the subject felt like someone put the words together about something that I was thinking on but couldn't pin it down.
- ksec 5y ago
  >I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people. That is a very nice way of putting it. Thank You.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Ha. That’s an amazingly profound statement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hnlmorg 5y ago
> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a market that Apple, Microsoft and many others had several attempts at cracking. It's very easy to assume someone is brilliant if you assume they didn't go through the same iterations that everyone else did. Iterations of trial and error before hitting upon brilliance. Jobs was great at marketing. He had some great people work under him. But he also had plenty of swing and misses too. I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early than most CEOs but I don't think that's true either.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I don't assume that Steve Jobs thought of the iPhone when having a shower or anything. As with every idea, it must have evolved as people worked on other stuff. In the case of iPhone, we know how it came to existence, it is a story told countless times. Didn't Nokia had R&D department? Of course they did and I'm sure that they also had brilliant designers and engineers who did amazing work. They simply lacked a Steve Jobs to weed out and steer their work to make it whole. In my opinion, Nokia failed due to poor leadership but not poor talent. Once Nokia was gone, the talent pool in Finland transformed and once again managed to do great things and be a hotspot.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where one decade company X will be on top and the follow decade another trend will follow. This is also true of Apple: they haven't always enjoyed the success they have now. They've been close to failing a few times. Microsoft even bailed them out once just to avoid ending up in a highly regulated monopoly.
bduerst 5y ago
>instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. Aka Blue Ocean product/market strategy. Basically, rather than being a shark swimming in a ocean that is colored red from the blood of all the other sharks competing, you leave and find a blue ocean. Sounds good on paper but sometimes that market is much smaller, and/or just being the first-to-market doesn't guarantee you'll be successful.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. He certainly spent a lot of time thinking about his own thoughts; trying to express them, trying to revise them. Like he was his own life's work in a way. It's a skill in itself isn't it?
iancmceachern 5y ago
100%, and his understanding early on that as computing power increased we would increasingly trade computing power for ease of use. This is the fundamental realization that allowed mass adoption of personal computing and continues to drive our personal computing progression. We currently have access to personal computers that are more than plenty powerful, the limiting factor is software and its ease/speed of use now.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. This oversells what Apple did and undersells just how much Nokia dropped the ball. Nokia wasn’t blindsided by the iPhone or touch screen interfaces. They knew about touchscreen interfaces and actively chose not to persue it. “Because people want tactile keyboards” essentially they Listened to much to their own engineers who were in love with blackberries. While Apple mindlessly perused a vision that notably had already failed them once in the Newton, and which every business major would say was a suicide mission “because the iPhone will canibalice the iPod market”. The reason Nokia failed was because management was just horribly bad. Not only did they have 500 different models of phones with every team competing internally, the were proud of it. Apple went out with “we have one phone and one phone only” at that time. And Nokia engineers laughed them off saying “how the hell will they ever complete with us, they have just one phone!?”, and of cause they also laughed at the price point, saying that trying to sell expensive phones in North America was concept that was dead at birth. No, to them true market dominance was to sell cheap phones in India and China. On the engineering side, that point in time was also when Nokia had extremely shitty software, again this wasn’t a mistake, they were proud of it. The N95 had like 4 different menu systems to reach the same screens. The iPhone didn’t do much before it had the web and apps, but it was simple, people intuitively understood it. But Nokia didn’t care. They didn’t even consider Apple a competitor even after iPhone started to gain popularity. They didn’t care about the high end market segment and only cared about Google as a competitor.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Thank you - that just hit the "insight" button for me - explaining like a time traveller.

by mrtksn 5y ago

pavlov 5y ago

I don’t agree with Thiel on a lot of things, but in this instance I do. When someone says “I’m very competitive,” I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people.

stocknoob 5y ago
Thanks, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the competitive mindset rubbed me the wrong way. It’s all about seeking external validation in the existing status quo.
mrtksn 5y ago
I'm on the same boat. Really not fan of him but his speech on the subject felt like someone put the words together about something that I was thinking on but couldn't pin it down.
ksec 5y ago
>I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people. That is a very nice way of putting it. Thank You.
zpeti 5y ago
Ha. That’s an amazingly profound statement.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hnlmorg 5y ago

> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a market that Apple, Microsoft and many others had several attempts at cracking. It's very easy to assume someone is brilliant if you assume they didn't go through the same iterations that everyone else did. Iterations of trial and error before hitting upon brilliance. Jobs was great at marketing. He had some great people work under him. But he also had plenty of swing and misses too. I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early than most CEOs but I don't think that's true either.

mrtksn 5y ago
I don't assume that Steve Jobs thought of the iPhone when having a shower or anything. As with every idea, it must have evolved as people worked on other stuff. In the case of iPhone, we know how it came to existence, it is a story told countless times. Didn't Nokia had R&D department? Of course they did and I'm sure that they also had brilliant designers and engineers who did amazing work. They simply lacked a Steve Jobs to weed out and steer their work to make it whole. In my opinion, Nokia failed due to poor leadership but not poor talent. Once Nokia was gone, the talent pool in Finland transformed and once again managed to do great things and be a hotspot.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where one decade company X will be on top and the follow decade another trend will follow. This is also true of Apple: they haven't always enjoyed the success they have now. They've been close to failing a few times. Microsoft even bailed them out once just to avoid ending up in a highly regulated monopoly.

bduerst 5y ago

>instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. Aka Blue Ocean product/market strategy. Basically, rather than being a shark swimming in a ocean that is colored red from the blood of all the other sharks competing, you leave and find a blue ocean. Sounds good on paper but sometimes that market is much smaller, and/or just being the first-to-market doesn't guarantee you'll be successful.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. He certainly spent a lot of time thinking about his own thoughts; trying to express them, trying to revise them. Like he was his own life's work in a way. It's a skill in itself isn't it?

iancmceachern 5y ago

100%, and his understanding early on that as computing power increased we would increasingly trade computing power for ease of use. This is the fundamental realization that allowed mass adoption of personal computing and continues to drive our personal computing progression. We currently have access to personal computers that are more than plenty powerful, the limiting factor is software and its ease/speed of use now.

isitmadeofglass 5y ago

> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. This oversells what Apple did and undersells just how much Nokia dropped the ball. Nokia wasn’t blindsided by the iPhone or touch screen interfaces. They knew about touchscreen interfaces and actively chose not to persue it. “Because people want tactile keyboards” essentially they Listened to much to their own engineers who were in love with blackberries. While Apple mindlessly perused a vision that notably had already failed them once in the Newton, and which every business major would say was a suicide mission “because the iPhone will canibalice the iPod market”. The reason Nokia failed was because management was just horribly bad. Not only did they have 500 different models of phones with every team competing internally, the were proud of it. Apple went out with “we have one phone and one phone only” at that time. And Nokia engineers laughed them off saying “how the hell will they ever complete with us, they have just one phone!?”, and of cause they also laughed at the price point, saying that trying to sell expensive phones in North America was concept that was dead at birth. No, to them true market dominance was to sell cheap phones in India and China. On the engineering side, that point in time was also when Nokia had extremely shitty software, again this wasn’t a mistake, they were proud of it. The N95 had like 4 different menu systems to reach the same screens. The iPhone didn’t do much before it had the web and apps, but it was simple, people intuitively understood it. But Nokia didn’t care. They didn’t even consider Apple a competitor even after iPhone started to gain popularity. They didn’t care about the high end market segment and only cared about Google as a competitor.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Thank you - that just hit the "insight" button for me - explaining like a time traveller.