14 ms·

Steve Jobs's Real Genius

414 points by iamclovin 15y ago

ghshephard 15y ago
Insightful and highly accurate characterization of Issacson's Biography. I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability, that narcissism, is essential to their ability to ensure their vision comes out with the purity that we saw in the iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air, etc... I also appreciate this characterization's of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination: "Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man."
- rimantas 15y ago
  > of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination Where can I read this rant? Or do you have in mind Jobs' rant about __Microsoft__ having no taste which is completely different thing.
  - latch 15y ago
    No, he means _Gates_ google: Jobs on Gate no imagination "Bill basically has no imagination and never find anything, that’s why I think he’s more comfortable this time on philanthropy rather than technological. He’s just shamelessly take others’ ideas," There's also another much older quote, which I think is an awesome one for Bill Gates: "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
    - rimantas 15y ago
      Oh, thanks. I fail, however, to see how Gates philanthropy relates to imagination. As for the second quote, it is nice but in reality things were much more complicated.
      - icandoitbetter 15y ago
        What Jobs probably meant (not that I agree with it necessarily): Philanthropy is using money to enable others to innovate, in contrast to being an innovator.
        latch 15y ago
        I agree that he meant something along those lines. Not being a philanthroper, I probably shouldn't comment, but I think says a lot about the man (essentially the point that the OP made, that he was a narrow genius)
        mayanksinghal 15y ago
        I think the article, although biased, maintains the basic assumptions really well. They are: Steve Jobs is a genius, at tweaking not inventing. Whether the reader agrees to this or not, is a different case. But this sections highlights the difference quite notably. To think of it, the article talks about the scale of Philanthropy of Gates in fields like Malaria eradication. This is a grande project, in it's entirety. There are no existing systems that work and Gates imagination of a possible solution cannot be ignored as is done by Jobs. This does make Jobs narrow minded in the way that he is considering only Technicalities and Design as imaginative and completely denying the imagination that might go into believing in a better (and in this case malaria free) future.
    - latch 15y ago
      Now that I've had time to read the article, I see that both quotes are actually in there.
    - glenra 15y ago
      > "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." The main problem with that analogy is that Jobs bought that TV set from Xerox. Xerox freely let Apple see what they were working on with the understanding that Apple would use some of these ideas. In exchange for this, Xerox got to profit from the resulting increase in the stock price - they got a bunch of early Apple stock. The bulk of this transaction was aboveboard and mutually beneficial. Microsoft didn't pay for Apple's info; they got access to it under a pretext and did not in return put Apple in a position to profit from what was used.
  - vacri 15y ago
    RTFA
- aufreak3 15y ago
  With due credit to Gates' intent behind the philanthropy he's undertaken, the relationship between good intent and good outcomes is by no means straightforward. In the book "the logic of failure" by Dietrich Dorner, he presents simulation experiments with some disturbing results. In his simulations, people were tasked to better the lives of nomads with high mortality rates and tsetse fly infested cattle. This who first saw their mission as a humanitarian one - i.e. about fixing the health problems of nomads and their cattle - end up causing famines instead. Those who succeed manage to achieve a slow improvement in standard metrics. I recommend that book to anyone who thinks solving the problems of a setup with many interdependent parts is a well understood thing or automatically apply thumb rules like "one problem at a time".
- pshc 15y ago
  >I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability [...] Couldn't it be the other way around? That he saw, as through looking at the Earth from space, his devices being shipped all the way around the world, knowing that any small imperfection or minor annoyance would be replicated millions of times over. In this perspective, a little sweat and tears and even going through dozens of iterations on the part of the inventor seems small compared to millions of man-hours of frustration around the globe.
capkutay 15y ago
There are no words that can sum up Steve Jobs genius and his contributions to modern society. On the other hand, I can't help but notice how much press/literature there has been on his genius and I think it's starting to be excessive. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not a fan of literature that praises success and goes in-depth into the lives/processes of talented people(that's why I'm not a fan of Gladwell's Outliers book). Where can you draw the line between admiring someone's achievements and idolising their every trait?
- antics 15y ago
  Hmm. Did we read the same article? The Jobs presented here is a narcissistic, tantrum-throwing, deluded hypocrite -- a man whose many personal flaws served as (sometimes very significant) advantages in his environment. Even the question of whether these (borderline disgusting) flaws are vindicated by his ability to cause to develop products is left open. I say this as a fan of Steve Jobs.
  - capkutay 15y ago
    Well...you could say the same for biographies of John Lennon that highlighted the personality flaws that accompanied his talent. Yes, the question of whether there is a connection or not is left open, but it's still glorifying his negative attributes because it's about him. In my opinion, whatever is written about Jobs at this point, good or bad, will be associated with his talent.
- tintin 15y ago
  "his contributions to modern society" I'm reading this a lot, but I have a hard time figuring what Jobs contributed to society. There are a lot of cars and there are 'perfected' cars like Ferrari. But does that mean the creators of Ferrari contributed to society?
  - philwelch 15y ago
    I'm reading this a lot, but I have a hard time figuring what Jobs contributed to society. Everyone who uses a personal computer, smartphone, or tablet of any description, or has watched a 3D computer-animated film, has been affected, for the better, by his life's work. So have the millions around the world who make a living, directly or indirectly, from the businesses he built.
ppk 15y ago
Why is it dated November 14, 2011?
- incremental 15y ago
  Print edition date.
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  The print edition will probably be in mailboxes Tuesday or Wednesday depending on where you live, and is probably already on news stands. But it's common practice with print magazines. I feel like this question is asked every time something from the New Yorker is posted to HN, and I feel old every time, even though I'm in my twenties.
glenra 15y ago
I keep thinking of this quote by George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Steve Jobs was the consummate unreasonable man.
tmsh 15y ago
I moderately disagree with Gladwell's conclusions, and fear he is trying to 'tweak' his own theories about 'tweakers' to fit Jobs. Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection). But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking. It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal behavior -- unless you have that vision.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  Was Pixar really a "tweak"? Remember that Jobs bought Pixar because he thought the hardware that Pixar designed and sold had potential. It wasn't until Lasseter's work in doing shorts (to show off the software) and commercials (to pay the bills) started taking off that the possibility of a feature movie came about. That's more like a "pivot".
kevinalexbrown 15y ago
I like the tweaker v innovator perspective. I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty.
- forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
  "I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty." <cynicism on> I agree that no company ever had innovated: when someone created mp3 players there were already Walkmans, so mp3 are Walkmans without tape, and digital instead of analog, before Walkmans there were other portable tape recorders and players. Before Nokia created cell phones there were already analog phones( I have one that weights 2Kgs or 4 pounds), and before that there were "portable" (backpack) radios. <cynicism off> Some people had pushed the envelope of what is possible, and some people instead of recognizing that prefer to diminish what they had done so they could feel better about their small accomplishments on life.
  - kevinalexbrown 15y ago
    My point wasn't to use the word "perfect" to "diminish what [Jobs] had done". At the end of the day there's a reason I prefer Apple to Microsoft and it has nothing to do with who innovated and everything to do with who perfected. I don't like Apple products because they do something new -- if they do, awesome, I just don't care. I like Apple products because they work well. I just don't see how that was diminishing what Jobs did?
- sbuk 15y ago
  Innovation is not the same as invention. It's an extremely common misconception, but they are different things. Tweaking is far more analogous to innovating than innovating is to inventing. From the Oxford English Dictionary definition of innovate; To bring in (something new) the first time; to introduce as new; to bring in or introduce novelties; to make changes in something established; to introduce innovations. Sometimes const. on or upon (also with indirect passive). Whereas invent; To come upon, find; to find out, discover; to find out or produce by mental activity; to devise, contrive; to plan, plot; to compose as a work of imagination or literary art; to treat in the way of literary or artistic composition; to devise something false or fictitious; to fabricate, feign, ‘make up’; to originate, introduce, or bring into use formally or by authority; to found, establish, institute, appoint. and tweak; An act of tweaking; a sharp wringing pull; a twitch, a pluck; a small modification or adjustment made to improve the efficiency of a mechanism. colloq.
bonch 15y ago
The more I read from this biography, the more it reinforces my suspicions that Steve Jobs was a bigger, more narcissistic asshole than I previously imagined. I always thought there was a temper but that it was probably exaggerated through first-hand accounts filtering to the outside world. Now I see that Jobs really was a petty, delusional bully who constantly took credit for other people's ideas in an insecure attempt to convince everyone that he was the creative genius behind everything. Much of the success in the second Jobs era of Apple is attributable to Ive, Cook, Schiller (it was in fact Schiller who first suggested the iPod's click wheel), and many others. I'm now beginning to believe that Jobs' presence is unnecessary and that without him, those who were the driving force behind Apple's recent successes will have a greater opportunity to shine. Much of the press that has been portraying him as the inventive genius behind Apple is playing right into the image Steve was always trying to reinforce. Hopefully, this biography, as well as other objective coverage, will open up the behind-the-scenes of Apple a bit and let people in on how much responsibility other people really had for Apple's success. Steve had plenty of failures in his career, and his obsession with the color scheme at NeXT didn't contribute to any kind of leadership position in the marketplace. Fretting over the design of your oxygen mask in the hospital just sounds ridiculous, almost as if he was knowingly playing a character, to add to his own mystique as the eccentric, meticulous jerk who's so zany that he frets over the design of his oxygen mask. Steve was very image-conscious, from his Beatles haircut to his turtleneck wardrobe. I think his policy of secrecy was important specifically to aid in maintaining that carefully crafted imagery, to avoid letting the salacious or less interesting realities of both him and Apple reach the public's ears. He was an interesting, motivating person, but I fear that future entrepreneurs will use the glorified image of Steve Jobs as justification to treat people like shit. It's not necessary and wasn't the reason for Apple's success. One must also wonder how much of Steve's stubbornness has cost Apple opportunities or how much his belittling of people has driven away talent.
niklas_a 15y ago
Dated November 14..are we seeing the future?
OoTheNigerian 15y ago
>When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” I too am like this. I know what I want when I see it. I also know good stuff. I am sure most people are the same way too. The main difference between us and Jobs is; we do not have the patience to wait until it it is right. The heart to tell 64 (!!!) nurses that they do not fit. The authority to tell geniuses their work suck and they should come back with more designs. He was willing to be rude, difficult and a bully to get it right. Are you?
- deleted 15y ago
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- Quarrelsome 15y ago
  Of all of the things to celebrate in Steve Jobs I'm not sure this is the best one. If anything its the easiest to mis-construe. Can you imagine how many people exist that are like Steve Jobs except without being able to "know good stuff"? And how hellish those people are? shudders Acting like this is super risky, if you don't get it right then everyone hates you and you don't have results.
  - OoTheNigerian 15y ago
    Maybe my comment hinted I appove of diminishing people. I do not. However, I wish I had the patience, clout, timing and resources to say no, until I am satsfied with the outcome (Hopfully before the use expires). I would love to do so being as humane as possible
- Toady 15y ago
  I hope entrepreneurs don't start confusing accountability with narcissism because of Steve Jobs. You don't have to be a rude, difficult, bully to get things right. Not only would Steve tell people that their work sucked, but when they finally produced something he approved of, he would often act as if it was his idea. His romanticized view of the world was also impractical, from the meaningless paint job of the NeXT factory to his refusal to have his body "invaded" by surgery. What point does it serve to go through 64 nurses or worry about the design of your oxygen mask? It's absurd and accomplishes nothing.
chubot 15y ago
It has some truth to it, but ignores a lot of salient facts in favor of a cute argument (insert Gladwell dig here). Steve Jobs' had many parts to his genius. Tweaking products until they were really finished was one. But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was holistic thinking. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products. Another part of his genius was to pick the best talent and get the most out of them. This is all obvious, but after reading Isaacson's book, which was quite good, this article is basically fluff. Gladwell basically just adds this marginally related story about tweakers so the entire article isn't regurgitating all the interesting anecdotes from the bio. EDIT: Also, the use of the word "tweaker" is a stupid rhetorical trick -- the article is basically a troll. "In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man." Really? Does anyone honestly believe a person that was CEO of 2 different companies that changed industries has a narrow vision? This is willfully ignoring reality to make a cute little article.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  It's also important not to leave out his ability to convince people of his vision. From Jurveston: "During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation." He used it in negotiations, with employees, with customers, and partners. I know he certainly used it with me - I eventually had to _force_ myself never to watch a product rollout by Jobs, I was so incapable of not becoming infatuated with the next great thing he would reveal... Outside of his RDF, I still believe, that essentially, his central accomplishment was to take technical gadgets, refine, demand, and finesse, until they came out so beautifully put together, we just had to have them. His ability to attract and motivate great talent was probably the third prong that contributed to his success. And you are right, to suggest he was just a tweaker, is a gladwellic troll that he's posing to simplify a scenario to fit in well with his article.
truth_hurts 15y ago
I never met Jobs and I know nothing about him personally. But if the stuff in this article is true, he was an obnoxious prick, genius or not.
- Mithaldu 15y ago
  This is so very true. The tinkering the article talks about didn't strike me as anything new or special because i do it every day in my job as a programmer. What i did get out of the article was this: Steve Jobs was a completely insufferable asshole.
- absconditus 15y ago
  I would love to work for such an obnoxious prick. I am tired of all of the incompetents in the corporate world who just try to get along with each other while accomplishing little or the startups producing yet another "social" site.
  - qdog 15y ago
    You might want to look into how it was like to work for neXt. There were more than a few layoffs during that phase of Jobs' life. Jobs had about a decade where he pretty much seemed like a failing prick until Disney funded Toy Story and start the second successful era of Jobs. I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Jobs' #1 asset was his Reality-Distortion-Field, anyone standing too close to him would get caught in it, it seems.
    - jonhendry 15y ago
      And yet there are people who followed him from Apple to NeXT and then came back to Apple, like Bud Tribble and George Crow. And people who went along from NeXT to Apple, or Pixar to NeXT to Apple. And people who were laid off from NeXT when they stopped making hardware, like Jon Rubenstein, who joined Apple in the Jobs era. For being a prick, he seems to have managed to attract some long-term loyalty. I think pricks are better-tolerated when they are trying to achieve something their underlings think is worthwhile and unique.
smutticus 15y ago
I guess Steve Jobs' real genius is that people here are still talking about him so long after he's dead. A bunch of self proscribed hackers find him more interesting than either John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie. When in fact he was just more successful monetarily. And better at getting you lot to talk about him.
- rayiner 15y ago
  Apples and oranges. There is something refreshing about someone who is willing to throw away a fundamental precept of tablet PCs (they have a stylus) because it sucks. I think every engineering team needs someone with some level of "wait why are we doing things this way?" (see P.G.'s essay on onions). In a way Ritchie was the exact opposite. A lot of the answers to questions of the form "why does C do things this way?" are "because BCPL did them that way." Which is a perfectly good attitude for an engineer as well ("don't fix what isn't broken") but also a more typical one.
bluekeybox 15y ago
Who is this Gladwell guy and what did he invent or made that is worth noting? Or did he simply take someone else's opinions using someone else's language and tweaked them a little bit to make them appear as his own?
- Avshalom 15y ago
  Wait, Really? Gladwell is kinda famous, written a couple of best sellers and stuff. That said opinions on him vary, his primary MO is to tell the audience something that contradicts common knowledge and provide enough facts to back it up, thereby making his audience feel smarter, which people love. On the other hand it's often just enough facts, and it's often technically true but a very shallow truth.
  - bluekeybox 15y ago
    Yeah, yeah, sure... Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people. Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with. Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker. This is very troubling. Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity. Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.
apitaru 15y ago
I found a simple method that works really well: ask the student to invent their own language syntax on paper. We start with a simple language that can draw on screen, and proceed from there. I'm noticing that Students naturally discover many of the issues and tricks that they would otherwise have to "study" (such as flow of execution, nesting, variables) I occasionally teach at schools in NY, and this semester my students "invented" the smalltalk syntax. It was heartwarming to witness.
- SickAnimations 15y ago
  Wrong thread?
  - apitaru 15y ago
    Oh I'm sorry! It was intended for this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204525 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204525
shawndumas 15y ago
I have to give Bill Gates the credit for nailing the real genius of Steven Jobs... . Lise Buyer (to Bill Gates and Steven Jobs): "Question, I guess it’s historical curiosity. You approached the same opportunity so very differently. What did you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of sooner or thought of first by watching the other guy?" . Bill Gates: "Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. [laughter] He has natural–it’s not a joke at all. I think in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products. You know, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done that I viewed as an engineering question; that’s just how my mind works. And I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different, I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow." . -- http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/ http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/
spodek 15y ago
Gladwell creates a dichotomy of the tweaker and inventor. I believe this dichotomy is false[1] and think he concludes Jobs a tweaker because all inventors are tweakers. Gladwell's tweakers are "skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men [people?] who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work". Inventors, by contrast, are large-scale visionaries. Who, among people who created things, exemplifies a large-scale visionary? [1] A conclusion largely based on Weisberg's excellent "Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius" and Goldenberg's "Systematic Creativity in Business" as profiled here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity
bh42222 15y ago
"Tweakers" (God what a horrible name, and I thought "hacker" was kind of bad for makers.) might have contributed to the industrial revolution in England. Then again, the relative prices of labor vs energy at the time probably played a greater role: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570 http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570 It made sense to invest in labor saving machinery because you actually saved money. In other places, labor was cheaper and energy more expensive, so it just wasn't economical to spend on industrial machinery.
faramarz 15y ago
Steve Jobs was a great director; perhaps the greatest of our generation. That's the simplest I can say it. It wasn't about his singular abilities or his design sense. He was the right director who had the decline and ownership to do the great things he did. I only read this piece because it was a Gladwell, but frankly i'm getting tired of every other person and their mom trying to define Steve Jobs.
sharmajai 15y ago
Was it, that he made things closed because he didn't want the user to screw them up or was it because he thought they were already perfect and couldn't be made better? I would like to believe the former.
grayrest 15y ago
I'm annoyed that Gladwell classifies Jobs as a tweaker. He's not. He's a tastemaker. From TFA: > When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” Can you imagine one of the British hacker/tweakers in the article (or a hacker/tweaker you know) EVER saying something like that? The respect I have for role comes from them having both the vision AND the skill to take something someone else invented and make it fly. Jobs sees a thing, decides "that sucks" and has the people he hired bring him iterations with varying degrees of feedback until he's happy. That stretches the definition of tweaking so far it basically makes the word meaningless, lacking both the engineering and the raw ideas. Jobs is probably the best tastemaker of all time, a great presenter, and a great CEO, but comparing him to the great hackers of the Industrial Revolution is offensive to me.
- deleted 15y ago
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  - grayrest 15y ago
    Sure. I believe engineers are one of the major forces that improve society. There is a tendency from the business side to assign credit for this work to the person who provided the money (and in this case guidance) for the project. This annoys me but to a lesser extend because the money/environment really is an important part of the process. In this case, Gladwell is basically crediting Jobs as being part of an engineering tradition that I highly respect without (afaict) Jobs actually possessing the key qualities of that tradition. Doing so makes Jobs look better at the expense of diluting the term, which strikes me as disrespectful to the hackers' accomplishments. Edit: This is a response to (paraphrased) "Why are you so emotional about this?"
jroseattle 15y ago
I'm ready for the Jobs dissertations to be finished. I've made up my mind -- he was professionally successful but a personal failure. It's my interpretation, so I'm not trying to change anyone else's opinion. But to me, if you have to scream at subordinates and mock colleagues and generally treat everyone else as inferior, you have failed -- in spite of one's accomplishments. Some call that perfection or simply dealing with the attributes of genius. I call it a cop-out to let petulence and immaturity be an acceptable excuse for success. An open request of all existing geniuses: try impressing us with accomplishments that don't require you to stomp on the dignity of others.
- vacri 15y ago
  It reminds me of my opinion on folks like Russell Crowe. Incredibly talented at what they do, but destroy people to further their product. Crowe uses and abuses people. He also has a reality distortion field, but woe betide you if you're in his way. Friends of mine say "but it's okay because he's such an artist!" to which I say bullshit, you can provide his product without being a mongrel. And people do.
niels_olson 15y ago
Almost done with the book. Having read it, this strikes me as a 7th grade book report. How does the same mag print Atul Gawande and this? And why does that irritate me?
saturdaysaint 15y ago
The more I read, the more I think that any attempt to seperate Jobs' "shortcomings" from his "genius" are wrong from the start. I look at Gladwell's anecdotes and I see that Jobs' greatest talent was making relatively modest (often borrowed) visions into well-executed reality via his unique combination of aesthetic sensitivity and barely controlled personality power (which, as Isaacson gets at, also seems a function of his deep sensitivity). Gladwell's theory falls apart if you really consider the competitors. If you look at the history of Microsoft's tablets and the Xerox Star, their biggest barrier wasn't a lack of "tweaking", it was the ability to get the products out of labs without getting killed or tweaked into mediocrity by a hundred conniving VPs. Here I think we need to acknowledge that Jobs' personality was part of his genius. Perhaps typical 20th century corporate culture/governance has been so inherently larded with politics, so easily driven into misaligned incentives, that it's been almost inimical to creating excellent products of high technical sophistication (especially involving both hardware and software). Perhaps recognizing and rapidly correcting these inherent sicknesses (from removing "B players" to forcing dramatic but necessary strategy shifts)and actually shipping great products requires a certain craziness, a rudeness.
ethank 15y ago
It always struck me that Jobs would have made a really, really good A&R executive and label president.
shashashasha 15y ago
Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said. This caption strikes me because my friend/professor in architecture just read Steve Jobs and said "Steve Jobs was an architect more than anything". We often collapse these things onto a domain more familiar to us, and the model of editor as Master Tweaker (and architect as Master Builder) seems to fit Gladwell's world of thinking.
- jonhendry 15y ago
  Or a director, ala Kubrick. The director doesn't hand-design everything in the film, but he guides the designers and selects what works.
code_duck 15y ago
This reminds me a lot of my business partner, who will not rest until our projects are perfect. She's driven me nuts the entire time I've worked with her, but this has brought our output to a much higher level than I would have achieved without such an influence. You have to love and hate someone who has such obsessive attention to detail. The key to making this mindset positive is knowing when it matters and when it doesn't.
bfrs 15y ago
---------------------------------------- Jobs, we learn, was a bully. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe". Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting". Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes... ...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea." ---------------------------------------- Was Jobs really such an asshole? If so, I think he was really lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.

414 points by iamclovin 15y ago

Insightful and highly accurate characterization of Issacson's Biography. I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability, that narcissism, is essential to their ability to ensure their vision comes out with the purity that we saw in the iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air, etc... I also appreciate this characterization's of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination: "Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man."

rimantas 15y ago
> of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination Where can I read this rant? Or do you have in mind Jobs' rant about __Microsoft__ having no taste which is completely different thing.
- latch 15y ago
  No, he means _Gates_ google: Jobs on Gate no imagination "Bill basically has no imagination and never find anything, that’s why I think he’s more comfortable this time on philanthropy rather than technological. He’s just shamelessly take others’ ideas," There's also another much older quote, which I think is an awesome one for Bill Gates: "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
  - rimantas 15y ago
    Oh, thanks. I fail, however, to see how Gates philanthropy relates to imagination. As for the second quote, it is nice but in reality things were much more complicated.
    - icandoitbetter 15y ago
      What Jobs probably meant (not that I agree with it necessarily): Philanthropy is using money to enable others to innovate, in contrast to being an innovator.
      - latch 15y ago
        I agree that he meant something along those lines. Not being a philanthroper, I probably shouldn't comment, but I think says a lot about the man (essentially the point that the OP made, that he was a narrow genius)
      - mayanksinghal 15y ago
        I think the article, although biased, maintains the basic assumptions really well. They are: Steve Jobs is a genius, at tweaking not inventing. Whether the reader agrees to this or not, is a different case. But this sections highlights the difference quite notably. To think of it, the article talks about the scale of Philanthropy of Gates in fields like Malaria eradication. This is a grande project, in it's entirety. There are no existing systems that work and Gates imagination of a possible solution cannot be ignored as is done by Jobs. This does make Jobs narrow minded in the way that he is considering only Technicalities and Design as imaginative and completely denying the imagination that might go into believing in a better (and in this case malaria free) future.
  - latch 15y ago
    Now that I've had time to read the article, I see that both quotes are actually in there.
  - glenra 15y ago
    > "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." The main problem with that analogy is that Jobs bought that TV set from Xerox. Xerox freely let Apple see what they were working on with the understanding that Apple would use some of these ideas. In exchange for this, Xerox got to profit from the resulting increase in the stock price - they got a bunch of early Apple stock. The bulk of this transaction was aboveboard and mutually beneficial. Microsoft didn't pay for Apple's info; they got access to it under a pretext and did not in return put Apple in a position to profit from what was used.
- vacri 15y ago
  RTFA
aufreak3 15y ago
With due credit to Gates' intent behind the philanthropy he's undertaken, the relationship between good intent and good outcomes is by no means straightforward. In the book "the logic of failure" by Dietrich Dorner, he presents simulation experiments with some disturbing results. In his simulations, people were tasked to better the lives of nomads with high mortality rates and tsetse fly infested cattle. This who first saw their mission as a humanitarian one - i.e. about fixing the health problems of nomads and their cattle - end up causing famines instead. Those who succeed manage to achieve a slow improvement in standard metrics. I recommend that book to anyone who thinks solving the problems of a setup with many interdependent parts is a well understood thing or automatically apply thumb rules like "one problem at a time".
pshc 15y ago
>I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability [...] Couldn't it be the other way around? That he saw, as through looking at the Earth from space, his devices being shipped all the way around the world, knowing that any small imperfection or minor annoyance would be replicated millions of times over. In this perspective, a little sweat and tears and even going through dozens of iterations on the part of the inventor seems small compared to millions of man-hours of frustration around the globe.

capkutay 15y ago

There are no words that can sum up Steve Jobs genius and his contributions to modern society. On the other hand, I can't help but notice how much press/literature there has been on his genius and I think it's starting to be excessive. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not a fan of literature that praises success and goes in-depth into the lives/processes of talented people(that's why I'm not a fan of Gladwell's Outliers book). Where can you draw the line between admiring someone's achievements and idolising their every trait?

antics 15y ago
Hmm. Did we read the same article? The Jobs presented here is a narcissistic, tantrum-throwing, deluded hypocrite -- a man whose many personal flaws served as (sometimes very significant) advantages in his environment. Even the question of whether these (borderline disgusting) flaws are vindicated by his ability to cause to develop products is left open. I say this as a fan of Steve Jobs.
- capkutay 15y ago
  Well...you could say the same for biographies of John Lennon that highlighted the personality flaws that accompanied his talent. Yes, the question of whether there is a connection or not is left open, but it's still glorifying his negative attributes because it's about him. In my opinion, whatever is written about Jobs at this point, good or bad, will be associated with his talent.
tintin 15y ago
"his contributions to modern society" I'm reading this a lot, but I have a hard time figuring what Jobs contributed to society. There are a lot of cars and there are 'perfected' cars like Ferrari. But does that mean the creators of Ferrari contributed to society?
- philwelch 15y ago
  I'm reading this a lot, but I have a hard time figuring what Jobs contributed to society. Everyone who uses a personal computer, smartphone, or tablet of any description, or has watched a 3D computer-animated film, has been affected, for the better, by his life's work. So have the millions around the world who make a living, directly or indirectly, from the businesses he built.

ppk 15y ago

Why is it dated November 14, 2011?

incremental 15y ago
Print edition date.
spacemanaki 15y ago
The print edition will probably be in mailboxes Tuesday or Wednesday depending on where you live, and is probably already on news stands. But it's common practice with print magazines. I feel like this question is asked every time something from the New Yorker is posted to HN, and I feel old every time, even though I'm in my twenties.

glenra 15y ago

I keep thinking of this quote by George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Steve Jobs was the consummate unreasonable man.

tmsh 15y ago

I moderately disagree with Gladwell's conclusions, and fear he is trying to 'tweak' his own theories about 'tweakers' to fit Jobs. Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection). But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking. It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal behavior -- unless you have that vision.

joezydeco 15y ago
Was Pixar really a "tweak"? Remember that Jobs bought Pixar because he thought the hardware that Pixar designed and sold had potential. It wasn't until Lasseter's work in doing shorts (to show off the software) and commercials (to pay the bills) started taking off that the possibility of a feature movie came about. That's more like a "pivot".

kevinalexbrown 15y ago

I like the tweaker v innovator perspective. I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty.

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
"I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty." <cynicism on> I agree that no company ever had innovated: when someone created mp3 players there were already Walkmans, so mp3 are Walkmans without tape, and digital instead of analog, before Walkmans there were other portable tape recorders and players. Before Nokia created cell phones there were already analog phones( I have one that weights 2Kgs or 4 pounds), and before that there were "portable" (backpack) radios. <cynicism off> Some people had pushed the envelope of what is possible, and some people instead of recognizing that prefer to diminish what they had done so they could feel better about their small accomplishments on life.
- kevinalexbrown 15y ago
  My point wasn't to use the word "perfect" to "diminish what [Jobs] had done". At the end of the day there's a reason I prefer Apple to Microsoft and it has nothing to do with who innovated and everything to do with who perfected. I don't like Apple products because they do something new -- if they do, awesome, I just don't care. I like Apple products because they work well. I just don't see how that was diminishing what Jobs did?
sbuk 15y ago
Innovation is not the same as invention. It's an extremely common misconception, but they are different things. Tweaking is far more analogous to innovating than innovating is to inventing. From the Oxford English Dictionary definition of innovate; To bring in (something new) the first time; to introduce as new; to bring in or introduce novelties; to make changes in something established; to introduce innovations. Sometimes const. on or upon (also with indirect passive). Whereas invent; To come upon, find; to find out, discover; to find out or produce by mental activity; to devise, contrive; to plan, plot; to compose as a work of imagination or literary art; to treat in the way of literary or artistic composition; to devise something false or fictitious; to fabricate, feign, ‘make up’; to originate, introduce, or bring into use formally or by authority; to found, establish, institute, appoint. and tweak; An act of tweaking; a sharp wringing pull; a twitch, a pluck; a small modification or adjustment made to improve the efficiency of a mechanism. colloq.

bonch 15y ago

The more I read from this biography, the more it reinforces my suspicions that Steve Jobs was a bigger, more narcissistic asshole than I previously imagined. I always thought there was a temper but that it was probably exaggerated through first-hand accounts filtering to the outside world. Now I see that Jobs really was a petty, delusional bully who constantly took credit for other people's ideas in an insecure attempt to convince everyone that he was the creative genius behind everything. Much of the success in the second Jobs era of Apple is attributable to Ive, Cook, Schiller (it was in fact Schiller who first suggested the iPod's click wheel), and many others. I'm now beginning to believe that Jobs' presence is unnecessary and that without him, those who were the driving force behind Apple's recent successes will have a greater opportunity to shine. Much of the press that has been portraying him as the inventive genius behind Apple is playing right into the image Steve was always trying to reinforce. Hopefully, this biography, as well as other objective coverage, will open up the behind-the-scenes of Apple a bit and let people in on how much responsibility other people really had for Apple's success. Steve had plenty of failures in his career, and his obsession with the color scheme at NeXT didn't contribute to any kind of leadership position in the marketplace. Fretting over the design of your oxygen mask in the hospital just sounds ridiculous, almost as if he was knowingly playing a character, to add to his own mystique as the eccentric, meticulous jerk who's so zany that he frets over the design of his oxygen mask. Steve was very image-conscious, from his Beatles haircut to his turtleneck wardrobe. I think his policy of secrecy was important specifically to aid in maintaining that carefully crafted imagery, to avoid letting the salacious or less interesting realities of both him and Apple reach the public's ears. He was an interesting, motivating person, but I fear that future entrepreneurs will use the glorified image of Steve Jobs as justification to treat people like shit. It's not necessary and wasn't the reason for Apple's success. One must also wonder how much of Steve's stubbornness has cost Apple opportunities or how much his belittling of people has driven away talent.

niklas_a 15y ago

Dated November 14..are we seeing the future?

OoTheNigerian 15y ago

>When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” I too am like this. I know what I want when I see it. I also know good stuff. I am sure most people are the same way too. The main difference between us and Jobs is; we do not have the patience to wait until it it is right. The heart to tell 64 (!!!) nurses that they do not fit. The authority to tell geniuses their work suck and they should come back with more designs. He was willing to be rude, difficult and a bully to get it right. Are you?

deleted 15y ago
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Quarrelsome 15y ago
Of all of the things to celebrate in Steve Jobs I'm not sure this is the best one. If anything its the easiest to mis-construe. Can you imagine how many people exist that are like Steve Jobs except without being able to "know good stuff"? And how hellish those people are? shudders Acting like this is super risky, if you don't get it right then everyone hates you and you don't have results.
- OoTheNigerian 15y ago
  Maybe my comment hinted I appove of diminishing people. I do not. However, I wish I had the patience, clout, timing and resources to say no, until I am satsfied with the outcome (Hopfully before the use expires). I would love to do so being as humane as possible
Toady 15y ago
I hope entrepreneurs don't start confusing accountability with narcissism because of Steve Jobs. You don't have to be a rude, difficult, bully to get things right. Not only would Steve tell people that their work sucked, but when they finally produced something he approved of, he would often act as if it was his idea. His romanticized view of the world was also impractical, from the meaningless paint job of the NeXT factory to his refusal to have his body "invaded" by surgery. What point does it serve to go through 64 nurses or worry about the design of your oxygen mask? It's absurd and accomplishes nothing.

chubot 15y ago

It has some truth to it, but ignores a lot of salient facts in favor of a cute argument (insert Gladwell dig here). Steve Jobs' had many parts to his genius. Tweaking products until they were really finished was one. But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was holistic thinking. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products. Another part of his genius was to pick the best talent and get the most out of them. This is all obvious, but after reading Isaacson's book, which was quite good, this article is basically fluff. Gladwell basically just adds this marginally related story about tweakers so the entire article isn't regurgitating all the interesting anecdotes from the bio. EDIT: Also, the use of the word "tweaker" is a stupid rhetorical trick -- the article is basically a troll. "In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man." Really? Does anyone honestly believe a person that was CEO of 2 different companies that changed industries has a narrow vision? This is willfully ignoring reality to make a cute little article.

ghshephard 15y ago
It's also important not to leave out his ability to convince people of his vision. From Jurveston: "During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation." He used it in negotiations, with employees, with customers, and partners. I know he certainly used it with me - I eventually had to _force_ myself never to watch a product rollout by Jobs, I was so incapable of not becoming infatuated with the next great thing he would reveal... Outside of his RDF, I still believe, that essentially, his central accomplishment was to take technical gadgets, refine, demand, and finesse, until they came out so beautifully put together, we just had to have them. His ability to attract and motivate great talent was probably the third prong that contributed to his success. And you are right, to suggest he was just a tweaker, is a gladwellic troll that he's posing to simplify a scenario to fit in well with his article.

truth_hurts 15y ago

I never met Jobs and I know nothing about him personally. But if the stuff in this article is true, he was an obnoxious prick, genius or not.

Mithaldu 15y ago
This is so very true. The tinkering the article talks about didn't strike me as anything new or special because i do it every day in my job as a programmer. What i did get out of the article was this: Steve Jobs was a completely insufferable asshole.
absconditus 15y ago
I would love to work for such an obnoxious prick. I am tired of all of the incompetents in the corporate world who just try to get along with each other while accomplishing little or the startups producing yet another "social" site.
- qdog 15y ago
  You might want to look into how it was like to work for neXt. There were more than a few layoffs during that phase of Jobs' life. Jobs had about a decade where he pretty much seemed like a failing prick until Disney funded Toy Story and start the second successful era of Jobs. I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Jobs' #1 asset was his Reality-Distortion-Field, anyone standing too close to him would get caught in it, it seems.
  - jonhendry 15y ago
    And yet there are people who followed him from Apple to NeXT and then came back to Apple, like Bud Tribble and George Crow. And people who went along from NeXT to Apple, or Pixar to NeXT to Apple. And people who were laid off from NeXT when they stopped making hardware, like Jon Rubenstein, who joined Apple in the Jobs era. For being a prick, he seems to have managed to attract some long-term loyalty. I think pricks are better-tolerated when they are trying to achieve something their underlings think is worthwhile and unique.

smutticus 15y ago

I guess Steve Jobs' real genius is that people here are still talking about him so long after he's dead. A bunch of self proscribed hackers find him more interesting than either John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie. When in fact he was just more successful monetarily. And better at getting you lot to talk about him.

rayiner 15y ago
Apples and oranges. There is something refreshing about someone who is willing to throw away a fundamental precept of tablet PCs (they have a stylus) because it sucks. I think every engineering team needs someone with some level of "wait why are we doing things this way?" (see P.G.'s essay on onions). In a way Ritchie was the exact opposite. A lot of the answers to questions of the form "why does C do things this way?" are "because BCPL did them that way." Which is a perfectly good attitude for an engineer as well ("don't fix what isn't broken") but also a more typical one.

bluekeybox 15y ago

Who is this Gladwell guy and what did he invent or made that is worth noting? Or did he simply take someone else's opinions using someone else's language and tweaked them a little bit to make them appear as his own?

Avshalom 15y ago
Wait, Really? Gladwell is kinda famous, written a couple of best sellers and stuff. That said opinions on him vary, his primary MO is to tell the audience something that contradicts common knowledge and provide enough facts to back it up, thereby making his audience feel smarter, which people love. On the other hand it's often just enough facts, and it's often technically true but a very shallow truth.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  Yeah, yeah, sure... Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people. Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with. Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker. This is very troubling. Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity. Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.

apitaru 15y ago

I found a simple method that works really well: ask the student to invent their own language syntax on paper. We start with a simple language that can draw on screen, and proceed from there. I'm noticing that Students naturally discover many of the issues and tricks that they would otherwise have to "study" (such as flow of execution, nesting, variables) I occasionally teach at schools in NY, and this semester my students "invented" the smalltalk syntax. It was heartwarming to witness.

SickAnimations 15y ago
Wrong thread?
- apitaru 15y ago
  Oh I'm sorry! It was intended for this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204525 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204525

shawndumas 15y ago

I have to give Bill Gates the credit for nailing the real genius of Steven Jobs... . Lise Buyer (to Bill Gates and Steven Jobs): "Question, I guess it’s historical curiosity. You approached the same opportunity so very differently. What did you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of sooner or thought of first by watching the other guy?" . Bill Gates: "Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. [laughter] He has natural–it’s not a joke at all. I think in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products. You know, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done that I viewed as an engineering question; that’s just how my mind works. And I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different, I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow." . -- http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/ http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/

spodek 15y ago

Gladwell creates a dichotomy of the tweaker and inventor. I believe this dichotomy is false[1] and think he concludes Jobs a tweaker because all inventors are tweakers. Gladwell's tweakers are "skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men [people?] who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work". Inventors, by contrast, are large-scale visionaries. Who, among people who created things, exemplifies a large-scale visionary? [1] A conclusion largely based on Weisberg's excellent "Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius" and Goldenberg's "Systematic Creativity in Business" as profiled here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity

bh42222 15y ago

"Tweakers" (God what a horrible name, and I thought "hacker" was kind of bad for makers.) might have contributed to the industrial revolution in England. Then again, the relative prices of labor vs energy at the time probably played a greater role: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570 http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570 It made sense to invest in labor saving machinery because you actually saved money. In other places, labor was cheaper and energy more expensive, so it just wasn't economical to spend on industrial machinery.

faramarz 15y ago

Steve Jobs was a great director; perhaps the greatest of our generation. That's the simplest I can say it. It wasn't about his singular abilities or his design sense. He was the right director who had the decline and ownership to do the great things he did. I only read this piece because it was a Gladwell, but frankly i'm getting tired of every other person and their mom trying to define Steve Jobs.

sharmajai 15y ago

Was it, that he made things closed because he didn't want the user to screw them up or was it because he thought they were already perfect and couldn't be made better? I would like to believe the former.

grayrest 15y ago

I'm annoyed that Gladwell classifies Jobs as a tweaker. He's not. He's a tastemaker. From TFA: > When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” Can you imagine one of the British hacker/tweakers in the article (or a hacker/tweaker you know) EVER saying something like that? The respect I have for role comes from them having both the vision AND the skill to take something someone else invented and make it fly. Jobs sees a thing, decides "that sucks" and has the people he hired bring him iterations with varying degrees of feedback until he's happy. That stretches the definition of tweaking so far it basically makes the word meaningless, lacking both the engineering and the raw ideas. Jobs is probably the best tastemaker of all time, a great presenter, and a great CEO, but comparing him to the great hackers of the Industrial Revolution is offensive to me.

deleted 15y ago
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- grayrest 15y ago
  Sure. I believe engineers are one of the major forces that improve society. There is a tendency from the business side to assign credit for this work to the person who provided the money (and in this case guidance) for the project. This annoys me but to a lesser extend because the money/environment really is an important part of the process. In this case, Gladwell is basically crediting Jobs as being part of an engineering tradition that I highly respect without (afaict) Jobs actually possessing the key qualities of that tradition. Doing so makes Jobs look better at the expense of diluting the term, which strikes me as disrespectful to the hackers' accomplishments. Edit: This is a response to (paraphrased) "Why are you so emotional about this?"

jroseattle 15y ago

I'm ready for the Jobs dissertations to be finished. I've made up my mind -- he was professionally successful but a personal failure. It's my interpretation, so I'm not trying to change anyone else's opinion. But to me, if you have to scream at subordinates and mock colleagues and generally treat everyone else as inferior, you have failed -- in spite of one's accomplishments. Some call that perfection or simply dealing with the attributes of genius. I call it a cop-out to let petulence and immaturity be an acceptable excuse for success. An open request of all existing geniuses: try impressing us with accomplishments that don't require you to stomp on the dignity of others.

vacri 15y ago
It reminds me of my opinion on folks like Russell Crowe. Incredibly talented at what they do, but destroy people to further their product. Crowe uses and abuses people. He also has a reality distortion field, but woe betide you if you're in his way. Friends of mine say "but it's okay because he's such an artist!" to which I say bullshit, you can provide his product without being a mongrel. And people do.

niels_olson 15y ago

Almost done with the book. Having read it, this strikes me as a 7th grade book report. How does the same mag print Atul Gawande and this? And why does that irritate me?

saturdaysaint 15y ago

The more I read, the more I think that any attempt to seperate Jobs' "shortcomings" from his "genius" are wrong from the start. I look at Gladwell's anecdotes and I see that Jobs' greatest talent was making relatively modest (often borrowed) visions into well-executed reality via his unique combination of aesthetic sensitivity and barely controlled personality power (which, as Isaacson gets at, also seems a function of his deep sensitivity). Gladwell's theory falls apart if you really consider the competitors. If you look at the history of Microsoft's tablets and the Xerox Star, their biggest barrier wasn't a lack of "tweaking", it was the ability to get the products out of labs without getting killed or tweaked into mediocrity by a hundred conniving VPs. Here I think we need to acknowledge that Jobs' personality was part of his genius. Perhaps typical 20th century corporate culture/governance has been so inherently larded with politics, so easily driven into misaligned incentives, that it's been almost inimical to creating excellent products of high technical sophistication (especially involving both hardware and software). Perhaps recognizing and rapidly correcting these inherent sicknesses (from removing "B players" to forcing dramatic but necessary strategy shifts)and actually shipping great products requires a certain craziness, a rudeness.

ethank 15y ago

It always struck me that Jobs would have made a really, really good A&R executive and label president.

shashashasha 15y ago

Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said. This caption strikes me because my friend/professor in architecture just read Steve Jobs and said "Steve Jobs was an architect more than anything". We often collapse these things onto a domain more familiar to us, and the model of editor as Master Tweaker (and architect as Master Builder) seems to fit Gladwell's world of thinking.

jonhendry 15y ago
Or a director, ala Kubrick. The director doesn't hand-design everything in the film, but he guides the designers and selects what works.

code_duck 15y ago

This reminds me a lot of my business partner, who will not rest until our projects are perfect. She's driven me nuts the entire time I've worked with her, but this has brought our output to a much higher level than I would have achieved without such an influence. You have to love and hate someone who has such obsessive attention to detail. The key to making this mindset positive is knowing when it matters and when it doesn't.

bfrs 15y ago

---------------------------------------- Jobs, we learn, was a bully. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe". Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting". Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes... ...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea." ---------------------------------------- Was Jobs really such an asshole? If so, I think he was really lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.