5 ms·

> 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 iPho

> 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.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    I don't say anything of that sort. Nokia made the best cellphones in the world and was never surpassed - it's just that people stopped using cellphones. In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to abandone whatever they are doing and started competing with Apple a few years later.
    - sleepybrett 5y ago
      I have a hard time deciding if the nokia 61xx era phone were the pinnacle at the time or the motorola star-tac flips.
    - asveikau 5y ago
      Symbian was good though. As was Maemo, imo even more so. Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship. I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in. That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Except they are uniquely brilliant. Several world changing products to their name even before becoming the worlds most profitable company in the history of humanity. That’s not overstating things either. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      You could have said the same about Microsoft, word for word, in the 90s. Similar arguments for Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others too. I even listed several world changing achievements for Nokia in the post you're refuting (if it wasn't for GSM there wouldn't even be an iPhone) what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too. Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.
fouc 5y ago
The value systems & vision of the people leading the R&D have a huge impact on the final design. Nokia phones went one way, iPhone went a different way.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing. And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. But in interviews he was also sort of a student-philosopher of decision-making. Witness the clip on this page, with Jobs talking about being taught about not interfering with brand design (in this case the NeXT brand) by Paul Rand: https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand You can see that made an impression on him and probably got absorbed into his sort of precision-anecdote-driven way of communicating his ideas. (The other thing I like about this clip is seeing Jobs talking quite personally about someone he admires)
- anamax 5y ago
  > He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I don't think most of them -- maybe any of them -- were his losses originally!
_carbyau_ 5y ago
Magic is a lot of never seen work, followed by a reveal.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  But we have seen the the work. Anyone who was paying any attention to the direction phones were going could see this work happening. And what’s more Apple have since shown their prototypes that lead to the first iPhone.

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.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I don't say anything of that sort. Nokia made the best cellphones in the world and was never surpassed - it's just that people stopped using cellphones. In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to abandone whatever they are doing and started competing with Apple a few years later.
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    I have a hard time deciding if the nokia 61xx era phone were the pinnacle at the time or the motorola star-tac flips.
  - asveikau 5y ago
    Symbian was good though. As was Maemo, imo even more so. Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship. I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in. That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Except they are uniquely brilliant. Several world changing products to their name even before becoming the worlds most profitable company in the history of humanity. That’s not overstating things either. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    You could have said the same about Microsoft, word for word, in the 90s. Similar arguments for Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others too. I even listed several world changing achievements for Nokia in the post you're refuting (if it wasn't for GSM there wouldn't even be an iPhone) what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too. Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.

fouc 5y ago

The value systems & vision of the people leading the R&D have a huge impact on the final design. Nokia phones went one way, iPhone went a different way.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing. And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. But in interviews he was also sort of a student-philosopher of decision-making. Witness the clip on this page, with Jobs talking about being taught about not interfering with brand design (in this case the NeXT brand) by Paul Rand: https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand You can see that made an impression on him and probably got absorbed into his sort of precision-anecdote-driven way of communicating his ideas. (The other thing I like about this clip is seeing Jobs talking quite personally about someone he admires)

anamax 5y ago
> He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I don't think most of them -- maybe any of them -- were his losses originally!

_carbyau_ 5y ago

Magic is a lot of never seen work, followed by a reveal.

hnlmorg 5y ago
But we have seen the the work. Anyone who was paying any attention to the direction phones were going could see this work happening. And what’s more Apple have since shown their prototypes that lead to the first iPhone.