8 ms·

A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the

A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor. It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor

m-s-y 1y ago
How so? I don’t believe that Ive is going along with the purchase.
- Animats 1y ago
  No? It's not a acqui-hire? The article says "joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware." Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
- browningstreet 1y ago
  OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. .. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. .. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.” https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e54f0ead8b04d037c30d6754 https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
  - pacerier 1y ago
    The link however isn't informative since "independent" can mean its opposite. Along with every other word in the article. We are after all literally talking about the guy who called openai "open"ai? Even your kid knows that none of the words used need make any sense.
gist 1y ago
Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
- burningChrome 1y ago
  Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company. He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else. The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business: After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13] When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14] Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16] Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
herval 1y ago
that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.
- mlindner 1y ago
  And even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders that people will willingly drop everything to go work for and who leads them on to achieve great things.
  - jinushaun 1y ago
    I think Elon’s strategy is that he hires workaholics like himself. It’s not a scalable general purpose strategy.
    - solumunus 1y ago
      For a workaholic, Elon seems to spend a lot of time not working.
      - tempestn 1y ago
        Depends on your definition of work, I guess.
        smatija 1y ago
        I don't think this fits anyone's definition of work: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hwxc17/documenting_the_saga_of_elon_musks_account/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hwxc17/docum...
        binary132 1y ago
        It seems as though you are trying to say that he isn’t a workaholic because he’s not very dedicated to playing games, but that surely doesn’t make sense.
doubtit 1y ago
[flagged]
- leoc 1y ago
  Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy. Though I suppose I’m in danger of sounding like pg talking about the Collisons as if they were poor boys made good.
  - doubtit 1y ago
    Relative to the sweatshop workers he relied on to avoid sewing his own shirts. For the same reason we don’t need 9,000 operating systems, it’s trivial to copy-paste, we don’t need Ive, Altman. The main audience is Millennials and younger and they know how this all works. There’s no generating hype when it’s more of the same; our brains normalize and simply cannot find novelty in it. SaaS competition was faked through cheap financing since every solution can be tuned for performance and features copy pasted. It’s software after all. We weren’t trying to be the first to save a bunch of stranded people. Just unicorn before the hype bubble for your business popped. This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives. “I hate programmers. They make everything so complicated.” Silicon Valley TV show is how people see software engineers. Asocial children. They don’t doubt there’s value in medicine research and real stuff logistics using software but have a sense it’s just serving software company employees more so than humanity at this point. And politics reflects public sentiment. Software workers do not have the same tax write off benefits as other classes of workers anymore. Along with end of ZIRP, these moves are due to a lot of discussed away from the public, global pushback to tech bros running the world.
    - animanoir 1y ago
      [dead]
mrcwinn 1y ago
Except that freezes Jony in time, as if he didn’t work alongside that editor for decades. I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
- brookst 1y ago
  I’m optimistic for this partnership and I hope you’re right. But Ive post-jobs just doesn’t have the same track record. He’s had a few years, maybe he’s learned and matured. I hope so.
- troupo 1y ago
  > I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates. He's had 6 years to create something—anything!—so far
quitit 1y ago
This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation. I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function. More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
- napierzaza 1y ago
  [dead]
- asveikau 1y ago
  Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow. I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head. But I guess ego keeps these people going.
  - eloisant 1y ago
    You don't get where Zuck is without a huge ego and power hunger. If is plan was to retire as a billionaire, he could have done so years ago.
    - sureIy 1y ago
      > huge ego and power hunger Some people should probably be stopped before they get too hungry. Same with some bald guy in Eurasia right now.
    - ece 1y ago
      Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are the exception, not the norm.
      - 1y ago
KolibriFly 1y ago
Altman clearly has vision and a sense for where the puck is going with AI, but being a design editor is something else entirely
- shafyy 1y ago
  Altman is a new era conman, he does not have any vision whatsoever.
  - binary132 1y ago
    thank you
    - pacerier 1y ago
      The branding is all you need to know about his vision: "Open"AI..
- andy_ppp 1y ago
  Clearly? I don’t think that’s certain at all.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  For me, OpenAI's venture into AI adjacent things (Windsurf, JI's company), is a signal that they are no longer seriously pursuing AGI.
  - shafyy 1y ago
    They never seriously persued AGI. It's all a hype, a scam. When will people finally understand this?
    - osigurdson 1y ago
      My take is they persued what was possible and hoped that would lead to AGI. They and probably everyone in the space then used hype to get continued investment and maybe to some extent believed it themselves. It isn't all a scam however, ChatGPT is useful.
qoez 1y ago
Given how messy the model names are and some of the failures like 'GPTs' I get the sense that he's pretty hands-off and mostly focuses on picking the people and then letting them do what they want. Maybe that'll work with Ive, maybe not.
basisword 1y ago
I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.
- Bjorkbat 1y ago
  He's still a great designer, the problem though is that without the right kind of editorializing force he'll make mistakes, usually in the form of compromising practicality and functionality for the sake of aesthetics. I should probably clarify that this isn't some fault unique to Jony Ive. It feels like it's common among designers and probably just creative people in general.

m-s-y 1y ago

How so? I don’t believe that Ive is going along with the purchase.

Animats 1y ago
No? It's not a acqui-hire? The article says "joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware." Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
browningstreet 1y ago
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. .. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. .. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.” https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e54f0ead8b04d037c30d6754 https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
- pacerier 1y ago
  The link however isn't informative since "independent" can mean its opposite. Along with every other word in the article. We are after all literally talking about the guy who called openai "open"ai? Even your kid knows that none of the words used need make any sense.

gist 1y ago

Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).

burningChrome 1y ago
Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company. He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else. The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business: After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13] When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14] Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16] Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]

herval 1y ago

that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.

mlindner 1y ago
And even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders that people will willingly drop everything to go work for and who leads them on to achieve great things.
- jinushaun 1y ago
  I think Elon’s strategy is that he hires workaholics like himself. It’s not a scalable general purpose strategy.
  - solumunus 1y ago
    For a workaholic, Elon seems to spend a lot of time not working.
    - tempestn 1y ago
      Depends on your definition of work, I guess.
      - smatija 1y ago
        I don't think this fits anyone's definition of work: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hwxc17/documenting_the_saga_of_elon_musks_account/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hwxc17/docum...
        binary132 1y ago
        It seems as though you are trying to say that he isn’t a workaholic because he’s not very dedicated to playing games, but that surely doesn’t make sense.

doubtit 1y ago

[flagged]

leoc 1y ago
Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy. Though I suppose I’m in danger of sounding like pg talking about the Collisons as if they were poor boys made good.
- doubtit 1y ago
  Relative to the sweatshop workers he relied on to avoid sewing his own shirts. For the same reason we don’t need 9,000 operating systems, it’s trivial to copy-paste, we don’t need Ive, Altman. The main audience is Millennials and younger and they know how this all works. There’s no generating hype when it’s more of the same; our brains normalize and simply cannot find novelty in it. SaaS competition was faked through cheap financing since every solution can be tuned for performance and features copy pasted. It’s software after all. We weren’t trying to be the first to save a bunch of stranded people. Just unicorn before the hype bubble for your business popped. This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives. “I hate programmers. They make everything so complicated.” Silicon Valley TV show is how people see software engineers. Asocial children. They don’t doubt there’s value in medicine research and real stuff logistics using software but have a sense it’s just serving software company employees more so than humanity at this point. And politics reflects public sentiment. Software workers do not have the same tax write off benefits as other classes of workers anymore. Along with end of ZIRP, these moves are due to a lot of discussed away from the public, global pushback to tech bros running the world.
  - animanoir 1y ago
    [dead]

mrcwinn 1y ago

Except that freezes Jony in time, as if he didn’t work alongside that editor for decades. I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.

brookst 1y ago
I’m optimistic for this partnership and I hope you’re right. But Ive post-jobs just doesn’t have the same track record. He’s had a few years, maybe he’s learned and matured. I hope so.
troupo 1y ago
> I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates. He's had 6 years to create something—anything!—so far

quitit 1y ago

This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation. I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function. More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.

napierzaza 1y ago
[dead]
asveikau 1y ago
Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow. I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head. But I guess ego keeps these people going.
- eloisant 1y ago
  You don't get where Zuck is without a huge ego and power hunger. If is plan was to retire as a billionaire, he could have done so years ago.
  - sureIy 1y ago
    > huge ego and power hunger Some people should probably be stopped before they get too hungry. Same with some bald guy in Eurasia right now.
  - ece 1y ago
    Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are the exception, not the norm.
    - 1y ago

KolibriFly 1y ago

Altman clearly has vision and a sense for where the puck is going with AI, but being a design editor is something else entirely

shafyy 1y ago
Altman is a new era conman, he does not have any vision whatsoever.
- binary132 1y ago
  thank you
  - pacerier 1y ago
    The branding is all you need to know about his vision: "Open"AI..
andy_ppp 1y ago
Clearly? I don’t think that’s certain at all.
osigurdson 1y ago
For me, OpenAI's venture into AI adjacent things (Windsurf, JI's company), is a signal that they are no longer seriously pursuing AGI.
- shafyy 1y ago
  They never seriously persued AGI. It's all a hype, a scam. When will people finally understand this?
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    My take is they persued what was possible and hoped that would lead to AGI. They and probably everyone in the space then used hype to get continued investment and maybe to some extent believed it themselves. It isn't all a scam however, ChatGPT is useful.

qoez 1y ago

Given how messy the model names are and some of the failures like 'GPTs' I get the sense that he's pretty hands-off and mostly focuses on picking the people and then letting them do what they want. Maybe that'll work with Ive, maybe not.

basisword 1y ago

I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.

Bjorkbat 1y ago
He's still a great designer, the problem though is that without the right kind of editorializing force he'll make mistakes, usually in the form of compromising practicality and functionality for the sake of aesthetics. I should probably clarify that this isn't some fault unique to Jony Ive. It feels like it's common among designers and probably just creative people in general.