Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point.
And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they, more than anything, demonstrate the height of Steve's capability of creating a company and product. Anybody who used Sun's Desktop OS and associated applications 5 years later saw how far ahead of the market NeXT was. I thought it was a far superior product to the Macintosh, which, by 1993/1994, was starting to get long in the tooth, and by 1996/1997 had fallen behind Windows in platform power/flexibility, causing me (never particularly religious about the platform I worked on - best tool for the job and all) to leave the Mac behind and switch to Windows (Followed by a switch back in 2003 when OS X took the lead again)
Does anyone honestly think Apple would exist today (and certainly not in it's current dominance) were it not for this single individual?
And, is it really a coincidence that Pixar rose to the heights it did with Steve at the helm?
Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. Designers/Architects are somewhat more rare, but they can be identified, recruited, and hired.
But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Certainly doesn't mean we have to like them as people though.
I did the exact same thing, because of similar views (using the best tool for the job). I also switched to Windows in 1995 or so, and switched back to Mac in 2004.
I mostly agree, but just one nit: Pixar was mostly John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and many wonderful folks including many animators. While Jobs personally funded the company for a long time (10 years or so? That's really quite a vision), he wasn't really running it.
I've spent a few hours reading the history of Pixar (it's controversial as to what role Jobs had, particularly around the "founding" - which he really wasn't) - and while I've come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs had very little (if any) role in actually running Pixar, he appears to have had some "catalyzing" effect - Issacson never really dived into that aspect of Job's personality - it might be his negotiating skill (which was epic), or his reality distortion field (which I think even Jobs fell under the influence of) - but from the very start of Apple, he just believed in a series of realities, and did whatever he could to change things so they came true.
Now, he didn't always win (most memorably in his ejection from Apple by the board), and sometimes this egomania had catastrophic effects - from his personal life, and most likely to his own health, where he refused to accept other people's opinion of what the best course of action was. You can argue and shape some people minds, but ultimately you can't win an argument with nature.
It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
> It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.
[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester
> But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
Who says that visionaries can't be egomaniacs? And, in the case of Jobs, who says that he could have been an effective visionary without being an egomaniac?
I don't think I worship Steve Jobs, nor do I think he's a hero. But I don't think anybody can second guess what he accomplished in his many careers. If it had just been the Apple, we could have ascribed that to Woz. Or the Macintosh, we could have suggested Raskin was the key, Or Next was all about Avie Tevanian, or Pixar was all about Lassiter, Or iMacs all about Jonie Ives, or iPod all about Fadell, or Apple 2.0s resurgence all about Tim Cook, iOS was all about Forstall, or the iPhone/iPad...
But, there's a common thread to all of those creations - and yes, behind all of them were massive collaborations of incredibly talented people, lead by inordinately brilliant designers, engineers, and architects - but in the center, unreasonably demanding and pushing, was Jobs.
That's all I think we need to give him credit for, but no less.
With respect that's as blinkered a view in the opposite direction. Neither the "Jobs was a genius" nor the "Jobs was an asshole" narratives are incorrect, but neither are complete and as such neither is particularly helpful or enlightening on it's own.
To me at least, what makes Jobs most interesting is what he achieved despite being an asshole and how that played out. He undoubtedly was a thoroughly unpleasant individual and people who worked with him will queue around the block to tell you that, but he also, coming from a pretty low baseline, turned Apple into the largest company in the world by getting many of those same people who will tell you he's an asshole to build genuinely great products.
The most interesting people are rarely one thing or the other - that's what makes them interesting.
> Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another.
The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
There is always room for differentiation at the top, either as an architect, or leader - but (speaking of my own profession) - I've never actually seen an environment where any particularly network engineer wasn't replaceable. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a first class network engineer is that they leave behind an environment that is well documented, designed to industry standards, and is pretty much resistant outages as a results of single points of failure.
A Network engineer who is a 'Hero' and can never go on vacation, is worth much less than a network engineer who has built an environment that any random Taos CCIE can come in and manage with a couple days cross training.
Ironically, from that perspective, the more fungible [1] a network engineer is, the more valuable they are.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
You seem to be contradicting his point, but as far as I can tell you're proving it.
The fact that you see such a stark difference between a first-class network engineer and the work of lesser mortals is proof that they aren't fungible.
I'll also point out that you have, perhaps unintentionally, changed the topic from design to maintenance. We're talking about product creation. Some people like to pretend that all the design happens in the head of the person with "designer" on their business cards. But anybody who has spent time in a team making great products knows that everybody is involved in design. It can't be otherwise, because design happens at the intersection of desire and possibility, and the technologists know the possibility space more deeply than anybody else can.
That a well-designed network can be easily maintained is demonstrates the great design skills of that first-class network engineer. That there are long periods in a network's life when design skills aren't needed isn't proof that technologists are interchangeable; it's proof that they aren't.
I don't totally disagree, but I think this is excessively sunny.
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.
>And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
Elon musk?
> And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
On the former, it's a fairly modern phenomenon for anyone to start multiple companies that succeed and grow to a large size (unless you look at historical periods now recognised as having been infamously financially unstable, like the Dutch tulip boom years). Those who were equally if not more successful than Jobs just didn't bounce from company to company, but invested their efforts in one place.
As to the latter question, I think you'll find that there are quite a few people who could lay equal claim to (a) producing that many great products, and (b) having created the products Jobs is credited with.
Personally, I think you're all overlooking something. The people who work in our industry are by and large professionals. And a professional does what the boss says because that's what the salary is for. It's not like we get the salary anyway and then do what the boss says if we feel like doing it or think he's inspiring enough!
So, to give an anecdotal example, when the iPad prototype comes to Jobs and he does that fish tank routine and says "aha- air bubbles, therefore you can still squash it down more", that's just being an arsehole to people who work for you. What, you think they had a dozen prototypes just so the boss could dunk one in water, destroying it? They're paid so that if he says "squash it more please", they go do it. That's what engineers do. The teenage drama queen nonsense isn't required.
And if you believe the arsehole-ness is a necessary thing to be a genius and get things done, you have been watching far too much House for your own good.
Honestly, the more you learn about Jobs, the less you see that you'd hold up to your kids as a role model; whereas the more you learn about Wozniak, the more you see that you'd hold up.
And we're still only talking about the technical work; nobody's commented yet on the moral issues surrounding the actual manufacture of products like the iPhone. Lovely device; but is that worth the human abuse it takes to manufacture it?