12 ms·

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products i

by naremu 4y ago

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. How many CEOs, product managers and the like have been caught promoting their own brand with a "tweeted from iPhone" tagline. Probably "efficient business people", but literally won't touch their own product while telling others to buy it. In contrast, one of the stories that always sticks in my mind about Jobs is one of early iPhone production runs having plastic screens, which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable. In a world where min-maxing cost to profit is all that matters, perpetual doubting of the efficacy of quality, all it took to cement Steve Jobs in the tech hall of history is some of the lowest hanging fruit left for him. Like hating crappy, easily scratched and degraded plastic screens. For all his faults, in retrospect, it was kind of nice to see an enthusiastic founding member of a large company say "we can do better" and in many ways, succeed.

oh_sigh 4y ago
Eric Schmidt famously got a lot of flack at Google because he insisted on sticking with his blackberry
- steveBK123 4y ago
  And its not like Sergei & Larry cared about product either.
theaussiestew 4y ago
But the thing is, we all tolerate things which are sheer crap, if viewed through a different set of lenses. For example, you probably tolerate many things that I personally would consider rubbish, and vice versa. You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all. My point is, many of us would have thought the plastic screen was fine, and that wasn’t because we weren’t “enthusiastic” about our own products. The same goes for a whole range of tools that we use everyday. It’s likely that in several years time we’ll look back and think it was ridiculous we thought some of them were good or even acceptable. Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish. This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. With that attitude in mind, it’s no wonder Apple became so successful, because they and Jobs actively embraced both.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  > Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies”... No. Hold up. This interface has 1 obvious reason that I see that no fancy polished interface can ever come close to: loading speed.
  - quacked 4y ago
    The day HN starts running that awful "squares on squares" JS design method where everything is a button with no borders is the day I leave HN. Luckily I don't think that day is coming.
  - lobstrosity420 4y ago
    You can absolutely have both. A little CSS would go a long way here, there is no reason to go full JS SPA to make a page look nice. In fact many times it’s the opposite.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I prefer HN website design for an entirely different reason: readability. More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.
- fumar 4y ago
  Why is it garish? I see it as the opposite and I am curious to hear another perspective.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc. Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenet of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.
amelius 4y ago
Yeah, it seems that all Jobs did better than the rest is caring about his product rather than profits. And it seems that everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  > And it seems everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits. Survivorship bias. Jobs himself was almost Apple's undoing multiple times because he cared more about the product than profits.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    The flip side of this is Bezos who cared about profits but not the product, generally speaking. He was a great operator clearly, but no product vision. Probably why we all use Amazon but none of us love doing so. If someone else figured out delivery & pricing (Walmart is trying with Jet), we'll all slowly defect. There's no lock in. Kindle is an adequate product that has sporadic iterative improvements and occasional backslides. Hardware is finally fine after many years of not, software is less so. Alexa is whatever. AWS is a cash cow, but thats more of a B2B/Enterprise offering.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > If someone else figured out delivery & pricing That is the product and it's clear Bezos & crew obsessed on getting commerce to be as frictionless as possible & earning customer loyalty. Dealing with Amazon as a customer is still 2x better than any other online retailer in my experience.
- Ryder123 4y ago
  I think the real magic is that he cared very deeply about both.
matthewfcarlson 4y ago
The more I read about Steve Jobs, the most I'm convinced he was potent mixture of persuasive and picky. I'm sure there was business sense, making some good bets, and the usual. But I think the key was him always saying we can do better. Makes him a real pain to work with, but you get good stuff as a result.
steveBK123 4y ago
In some ways this can be read as minimizing Jobs, on the other hand you can hold this up against the vast majority of todays operators/founders and find them lacking. No one is going to care about your product more than you, so if you don't care.. then no one does. Jobs got that and lived by it. It sounds trivial, but how many of the current FAANG founders/CEOs actually care about their product outside of Zuck? Musk maybe, not necessarily for good reason, and his attention is spread far too thin. There's little modern analogy for the 80s-90s Jobs-Gates feud, and even Gates clearly didn't care as much given how early he exited and moved on with life. A lot of modern tech is founded by guys who want to cash out and move onto their science projects/hobbies, and it shows.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > outside of Zuck? I don't think Zuckerberg cares about his product, really. He cares about the income from his product. That's a different thing.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Probably right. He just seems the closest to caring. Maybe he just doesn't have good product taste (cough metaverse), and he's very happy to copy-paste competitors.
attractivechaos 4y ago
Many CEOs have their preferences but their preferences may not be shared by their customers (e.g. metaverse). In my view, Steve Jobs was different in that a) his "taste" was deeply shared by targeted customers and more importantly b) he knew how to materialize his taste. Many people only like a product when they see/use it. Jobs was among the few who could make that product by instinct.
jrowen 4y ago
What's amazing to me is how some people continually try to minimize him. The proof is in the pudding. He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Very few people are able to do that. Any time someone says "oh he just," it says more about their own insecurity than him. Yeah he had a lot of help, yeah he had personal relationship issues, he's not a god, but I don't understand why some people refuse to appreciate what he accomplished. It's a limiting "hater" mindset. (This is not necessarily entirely directed at the above post [which did kind of strangely come around]).
- ksec 4y ago
  1. They have zero understanding of business, they have zero understanding of how hard it is to run a successful business. 2. They have minimal people management experience, which means they never understood how hard it is to recruit top talent, retain them, all while molding them into something much better. 3. They also have zero sales experience and talent. As if trying to convince people to buy could be automated by their software ( Google ). 4. They have little understanding of Marketing. How to market their product to the outside world. 5. They have no understanding of how PR works. 6. They have little understanding of "real world". Zero interest rate, easy access of money, and bull market for the past 15 years meant most never been through a recession. HN used to be full of entrepreneur, after all it is a forum for startup. And its pro-business stand is why on Wiki it is still listed as alt-right. And yet somehow all of that were gone.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I don't think I can agree with this take. > He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".
  - detourdog 4y ago
mbesto 4y ago
> which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable. Which required a technological innovation that may or may not existed at the time. This is like saying "autonomous cars can't ever hit a human being". Well, no shit, that would be great, but the technology isn't there yet. It's well and good to romanticize Steve Jobs, but "assigning single factor causation to the output of complex adaptive system is a triumph of hope over experience"...his obsession with product design was certainly a factor, but it wasn't the ONLY factor.
- eloisant 4y ago
  One thing Apple was good at is not releasing a product until the technology to make it good exists. There have been rumors of an iPhone way before release, even the name was obvious to everyone (after the iPod and the iMac), and Apple probably had a prototype with a stylus and a plastic screen. However they didn't release it until capacitive screen were ready for consumer electronics. That's why Apple is often seen not as the company that makes a certain product category popular: because they wait until all the pieces are in places when other companies will release earlier with whatever tech is available at the time.
deanCommie 4y ago
Watch (or listen to) some of the old Steve Jobs interviews at ALl Things Digital: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-all-things-digital-conference-video/id529997900 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al... It is remarkable how prescient he is about the future that was a decade away. How revolutionary some of the things he demo'd were at the time that we now take absolutely for granted. The man was mercurial and probably not fun to work for. And many a marriage or personal relationship was probably ruined by the intense Apple work environment at the time. But he shaped (not built) a lot of our future. No one else at the time was as visionary. And I say this as someone who endlessly criticized Apple at the time. I hated everything they were doing. I thought they were making toys for finger painters. I didn't see it.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  And this one (from 2:25): https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139 https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139 It's 3m and to the point. Build products the customer wants instead of building and marketing your existing tech.
didgetmaster 4y ago
It is surprising how hard it is to find co-founders with business experience who will actually be enthusiastic about the product they are supposed to promote. I am a technical founder who has tried (and failed) a few times to get a business partner on board to promote and sell the product. I had two guys join on with big talk about how they were perfect for turning it into a home-run project. Neither one lasted even a year. No matter how many demos I showed them and walked them through the product (software that does data management); I just couldn't get them to try it out on their own and be excited about the technology. https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-jobs https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-job...
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  I wish I could say I was surprised. This lack of vision is endemic, and business culture both attracts and preaches that watching out for #1 is the highest value. Did you ever discover any questions/filtering criteria for weeding out potential founders who lack the vision needed?
- esafak 4y ago
  Just study business yourself. It's not rocket science. And hone your social skills!
scj 4y ago
Steve Jobs made products for himself. He just subsidized costs by selling to the rest of us.
iamdbtoo 4y ago
It's here where I personally find value in Jobs' ideas. I believe the products he developed are amazing because ultimately he cared about the user. He found those little places where people get annoyed with the things they own and made the user's needs in those moments a priority. We probably would've gotten along just fine with scratched plastic screens after some use, but for someone at that level to put their foot down and not let it happen is so incredibly rare.

by naremu 4y ago

oh_sigh 4y ago

Eric Schmidt famously got a lot of flack at Google because he insisted on sticking with his blackberry

steveBK123 4y ago
And its not like Sergei & Larry cared about product either.

theaussiestew 4y ago

But the thing is, we all tolerate things which are sheer crap, if viewed through a different set of lenses. For example, you probably tolerate many things that I personally would consider rubbish, and vice versa. You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all. My point is, many of us would have thought the plastic screen was fine, and that wasn’t because we weren’t “enthusiastic” about our own products. The same goes for a whole range of tools that we use everyday. It’s likely that in several years time we’ll look back and think it was ridiculous we thought some of them were good or even acceptable. Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish. This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. With that attitude in mind, it’s no wonder Apple became so successful, because they and Jobs actively embraced both.

bboygravity 4y ago
> Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies”... No. Hold up. This interface has 1 obvious reason that I see that no fancy polished interface can ever come close to: loading speed.
- quacked 4y ago
  The day HN starts running that awful "squares on squares" JS design method where everything is a button with no borders is the day I leave HN. Luckily I don't think that day is coming.
- lobstrosity420 4y ago
  You can absolutely have both. A little CSS would go a long way here, there is no reason to go full JS SPA to make a page look nice. In fact many times it’s the opposite.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I prefer HN website design for an entirely different reason: readability. More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.
fumar 4y ago
Why is it garish? I see it as the opposite and I am curious to hear another perspective.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
> This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc. Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenet of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.

amelius 4y ago

Yeah, it seems that all Jobs did better than the rest is caring about his product rather than profits. And it seems that everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits.

wmeredith 4y ago
> And it seems everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits. Survivorship bias. Jobs himself was almost Apple's undoing multiple times because he cared more about the product than profits.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  The flip side of this is Bezos who cared about profits but not the product, generally speaking. He was a great operator clearly, but no product vision. Probably why we all use Amazon but none of us love doing so. If someone else figured out delivery & pricing (Walmart is trying with Jet), we'll all slowly defect. There's no lock in. Kindle is an adequate product that has sporadic iterative improvements and occasional backslides. Hardware is finally fine after many years of not, software is less so. Alexa is whatever. AWS is a cash cow, but thats more of a B2B/Enterprise offering.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > If someone else figured out delivery & pricing That is the product and it's clear Bezos & crew obsessed on getting commerce to be as frictionless as possible & earning customer loyalty. Dealing with Amazon as a customer is still 2x better than any other online retailer in my experience.
Ryder123 4y ago
I think the real magic is that he cared very deeply about both.

matthewfcarlson 4y ago

The more I read about Steve Jobs, the most I'm convinced he was potent mixture of persuasive and picky. I'm sure there was business sense, making some good bets, and the usual. But I think the key was him always saying we can do better. Makes him a real pain to work with, but you get good stuff as a result.

steveBK123 4y ago

In some ways this can be read as minimizing Jobs, on the other hand you can hold this up against the vast majority of todays operators/founders and find them lacking. No one is going to care about your product more than you, so if you don't care.. then no one does. Jobs got that and lived by it. It sounds trivial, but how many of the current FAANG founders/CEOs actually care about their product outside of Zuck? Musk maybe, not necessarily for good reason, and his attention is spread far too thin. There's little modern analogy for the 80s-90s Jobs-Gates feud, and even Gates clearly didn't care as much given how early he exited and moved on with life. A lot of modern tech is founded by guys who want to cash out and move onto their science projects/hobbies, and it shows.

JohnFen 4y ago
> outside of Zuck? I don't think Zuckerberg cares about his product, really. He cares about the income from his product. That's a different thing.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Probably right. He just seems the closest to caring. Maybe he just doesn't have good product taste (cough metaverse), and he's very happy to copy-paste competitors.

attractivechaos 4y ago

Many CEOs have their preferences but their preferences may not be shared by their customers (e.g. metaverse). In my view, Steve Jobs was different in that a) his "taste" was deeply shared by targeted customers and more importantly b) he knew how to materialize his taste. Many people only like a product when they see/use it. Jobs was among the few who could make that product by instinct.

jrowen 4y ago

What's amazing to me is how some people continually try to minimize him. The proof is in the pudding. He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Very few people are able to do that. Any time someone says "oh he just," it says more about their own insecurity than him. Yeah he had a lot of help, yeah he had personal relationship issues, he's not a god, but I don't understand why some people refuse to appreciate what he accomplished. It's a limiting "hater" mindset. (This is not necessarily entirely directed at the above post [which did kind of strangely come around]).

ksec 4y ago
1. They have zero understanding of business, they have zero understanding of how hard it is to run a successful business. 2. They have minimal people management experience, which means they never understood how hard it is to recruit top talent, retain them, all while molding them into something much better. 3. They also have zero sales experience and talent. As if trying to convince people to buy could be automated by their software ( Google ). 4. They have little understanding of Marketing. How to market their product to the outside world. 5. They have no understanding of how PR works. 6. They have little understanding of "real world". Zero interest rate, easy access of money, and bull market for the past 15 years meant most never been through a recession. HN used to be full of entrepreneur, after all it is a forum for startup. And its pro-business stand is why on Wiki it is still listed as alt-right. And yet somehow all of that were gone.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I don't think I can agree with this take. > He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".
- detourdog 4y ago

mbesto 4y ago

> which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable. Which required a technological innovation that may or may not existed at the time. This is like saying "autonomous cars can't ever hit a human being". Well, no shit, that would be great, but the technology isn't there yet. It's well and good to romanticize Steve Jobs, but "assigning single factor causation to the output of complex adaptive system is a triumph of hope over experience"...his obsession with product design was certainly a factor, but it wasn't the ONLY factor.

eloisant 4y ago
One thing Apple was good at is not releasing a product until the technology to make it good exists. There have been rumors of an iPhone way before release, even the name was obvious to everyone (after the iPod and the iMac), and Apple probably had a prototype with a stylus and a plastic screen. However they didn't release it until capacitive screen were ready for consumer electronics. That's why Apple is often seen not as the company that makes a certain product category popular: because they wait until all the pieces are in places when other companies will release earlier with whatever tech is available at the time.

deanCommie 4y ago

Watch (or listen to) some of the old Steve Jobs interviews at ALl Things Digital: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-all-things-digital-conference-video/id529997900 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al... It is remarkable how prescient he is about the future that was a decade away. How revolutionary some of the things he demo'd were at the time that we now take absolutely for granted. The man was mercurial and probably not fun to work for. And many a marriage or personal relationship was probably ruined by the intense Apple work environment at the time. But he shaped (not built) a lot of our future. No one else at the time was as visionary. And I say this as someone who endlessly criticized Apple at the time. I hated everything they were doing. I thought they were making toys for finger painters. I didn't see it.

donmcronald 4y ago
And this one (from 2:25): https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139 https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139 It's 3m and to the point. Build products the customer wants instead of building and marketing your existing tech.

didgetmaster 4y ago

It is surprising how hard it is to find co-founders with business experience who will actually be enthusiastic about the product they are supposed to promote. I am a technical founder who has tried (and failed) a few times to get a business partner on board to promote and sell the product. I had two guys join on with big talk about how they were perfect for turning it into a home-run project. Neither one lasted even a year. No matter how many demos I showed them and walked them through the product (software that does data management); I just couldn't get them to try it out on their own and be excited about the technology. https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-jobs https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-job...

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
I wish I could say I was surprised. This lack of vision is endemic, and business culture both attracts and preaches that watching out for #1 is the highest value. Did you ever discover any questions/filtering criteria for weeding out potential founders who lack the vision needed?
esafak 4y ago
Just study business yourself. It's not rocket science. And hone your social skills!

scj 4y ago

Steve Jobs made products for himself. He just subsidized costs by selling to the rest of us.

iamdbtoo 4y ago

It's here where I personally find value in Jobs' ideas. I believe the products he developed are amazing because ultimately he cared about the user. He found those little places where people get annoyed with the things they own and made the user's needs in those moments a priority. We probably would've gotten along just fine with scratched plastic screens after some use, but for someone at that level to put their foot down and not let it happen is so incredibly rare.