9 ms·

Jobs was more than a "shrewd businessman". Building Pixar over 10 years into one of the top movie studios was not some "shrewd" business decision. Ditto for NeX

by abalone 13y ago

Jobs was more than a "shrewd businessman". Building Pixar over 10 years into one of the top movie studios was not some "shrewd" business decision. Ditto for NeXT, the early Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.. It's more accurate to say he was a visionary who took a long term view. It's only in retrospect that we have the luxury of looking on his track record as smart from a business standpoint. Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. Which tells you a lot about what separates Woz from Jobs. Folks like Woz were a big influence on Jobs. So were a bunch of other people. The idea that he just took other peoples' ideas and marketed them is the same old trope. He took the best raw, undeveloped ideas from the billions around him and fit them to together and refined them into something accessible to everyone. VERY FEW people can do that well. He proved he could do it, not just once, but countless times in multiple categories.

kabouseng 13y ago
And then take all the credit for the ideas, saying it came to him in a dream...pffft (touch interface for the iPhone).
- gnaffle 13y ago
  When did he say that?
  - kabouseng 13y ago
    I'll have to go search for a link. But it was during the keynote unveiling of the original iPhone if I remember correctly, where actually two of the engineers came to him to demonstrate the capacitive touch screens or panels that were only just beginning to receive main stream attention.
    - gnaffle 13y ago
      I've watched that keynote, and it certainly wasn't there. While Jobs had a tendency to claim ideas as his own internally (often after dismissing it initially), to the public he never seemed to like to claim ideas as his own, but rather make a point of how the products were a result of teamwork.
sliverstorm 13y ago
I wasn't making any particular assertion about what Jobs was. Call him a businessman, call him a visionary, call him whatever you like. Unfortunately, no matter what I call him, someone will object.
- rquantz 13y ago
  I guess you just have to call him "Steve Jobs"
wirrbel 13y ago
Jobs is a designer. Using existing pieces to create a good product. While this is an important skill to have, it is nothing I would idolize someone for, moreover, Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing (and really awesome hacking). This is _division of labor_. You just cannot build products alone. While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too often humbled those people making his products possible. This is not cool at all. I refuse the viewpoint that a manager has to be that way to implement his vision. Since the era of Romanticism in the 19th century, we like to think in terms of "Geniuses" and look out for them to admire them. This is pretty sad, because it should be well known by now, that only with collaboration real products and inventions can be delivered.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  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.
Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
Shame he didn't learn empathy from Woz - arguably the greatest flaw in his character and possibly the biggest need he had as a human being.
- ClementM 13y ago
  I have tried to research whether Steve Jobs was 'suffering' from narcissistic personality disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord... without finding much more than speculations. But if you look at the 'symptoms' list, and compare to the various reports from people having worked with him, it looks like it. Lack of empathy is a typical symptom.
hyp0 13y ago
Ed Catmull said the best thing Jobs did for Pixar was stay out of the way. Literally, not interfering and instead letting Catmull and Lasseter get on with it; yet providing support when needed (via introductions and so one). He was more VC than founder.
gbhn 13y ago
By "countless" I think you mean "half a dozen, with perhaps a 25% success rate." Its important that we realize that the upper end of the impact scale isn't an endless string of success, but "a few." One is really hard, and failure is common. By the same token, a few successes are truly impressive. It takes a lot of execution and judgment to avoid many, many pitfalls.
justin66 13y ago
> Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable terms. Jobs liked to make fun of Amelio, which always struck me as a little ridiculous. People like to latch on to Jobs's personality quirks as being strange, wonderful advantages but I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been if he'd actually developed a better ability to work with and persuade people like John Sculley and his board. The world could have been pretty different if he'd had the people skills to hang in there at Apple. NeXT being developed within Apple might have meant big early success, which might have meant things going a pretty different way in the nineties...
- abalone 13y ago
  "I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..." I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.
  - justin66 13y ago
    I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response. To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties. If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
  - abalone 13y ago
    Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct"). You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem. Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects. Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.

by abalone 13y ago

kabouseng 13y ago

And then take all the credit for the ideas, saying it came to him in a dream...pffft (touch interface for the iPhone).

gnaffle 13y ago
When did he say that?
- kabouseng 13y ago
  I'll have to go search for a link. But it was during the keynote unveiling of the original iPhone if I remember correctly, where actually two of the engineers came to him to demonstrate the capacitive touch screens or panels that were only just beginning to receive main stream attention.
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    I've watched that keynote, and it certainly wasn't there. While Jobs had a tendency to claim ideas as his own internally (often after dismissing it initially), to the public he never seemed to like to claim ideas as his own, but rather make a point of how the products were a result of teamwork.

sliverstorm 13y ago

I wasn't making any particular assertion about what Jobs was. Call him a businessman, call him a visionary, call him whatever you like. Unfortunately, no matter what I call him, someone will object.

rquantz 13y ago
I guess you just have to call him "Steve Jobs"

wirrbel 13y ago

Jobs is a designer. Using existing pieces to create a good product. While this is an important skill to have, it is nothing I would idolize someone for, moreover, Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing (and really awesome hacking). This is _division of labor_. You just cannot build products alone. While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too often humbled those people making his products possible. This is not cool at all. I refuse the viewpoint that a manager has to be that way to implement his vision. Since the era of Romanticism in the 19th century, we like to think in terms of "Geniuses" and look out for them to admire them. This is pretty sad, because it should be well known by now, that only with collaboration real products and inventions can be delivered.

ghshephard 13y ago
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.

Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago

Shame he didn't learn empathy from Woz - arguably the greatest flaw in his character and possibly the biggest need he had as a human being.

ClementM 13y ago
I have tried to research whether Steve Jobs was 'suffering' from narcissistic personality disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord... without finding much more than speculations. But if you look at the 'symptoms' list, and compare to the various reports from people having worked with him, it looks like it. Lack of empathy is a typical symptom.

hyp0 13y ago

Ed Catmull said the best thing Jobs did for Pixar was stay out of the way. Literally, not interfering and instead letting Catmull and Lasseter get on with it; yet providing support when needed (via introductions and so one). He was more VC than founder.

gbhn 13y ago

By "countless" I think you mean "half a dozen, with perhaps a 25% success rate." Its important that we realize that the upper end of the impact scale isn't an endless string of success, but "a few." One is really hard, and failure is common. By the same token, a few successes are truly impressive. It takes a lot of execution and judgment to avoid many, many pitfalls.

justin66 13y ago

> Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable terms. Jobs liked to make fun of Amelio, which always struck me as a little ridiculous. People like to latch on to Jobs's personality quirks as being strange, wonderful advantages but I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been if he'd actually developed a better ability to work with and persuade people like John Sculley and his board. The world could have been pretty different if he'd had the people skills to hang in there at Apple. NeXT being developed within Apple might have meant big early success, which might have meant things going a pretty different way in the nineties...

abalone 13y ago
"I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..." I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.
- justin66 13y ago
  I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response. To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties. If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
- abalone 13y ago
  Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct"). You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem. Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects. Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.