I've never worked for Apple and never really aspired to, mostly because my interests didn't overlap with what I thought I would probably be doing there, but partly, I have to admit, because I had heard the stories of Steve the tyrant and was put off by them.
Maybe my ego is sturdier now, because I wonder if I wouldn't have enjoyed the challenges he set people. One thing is for sure, you could know that if you did what he wanted, it wasn't going to be a me-too product.
I've worked briefly at Apple, but had only one face-to-face encounter with Steve. It was intensely scary. He was loved -- LOVED -- on the Apple campus. But he was also feared. And I felt that fear when I saw him. He was, and remains, the only person I've been genuinely "star struck" upon encountering. A lot of that was born of admiration, but just as much was born of terror.
In retrospect, I realized that I wasn't really afraid of Steve. I was afraid of myself: my limitations, my shortcomings, my relative talent (or lack thereof), and my performance in life vis-a-vis my self-theorized potential. When I saw Steve Jobs in the flesh, I saw an embodiment of everything I was not, and probably never would be. Frankly, I felt like a fraud. I felt unworthy.
A lot of that seems silly now, and will strike readers of this post as childish, if not fawningly fanboyish. But it was a very intense feeling that he inspired, even if unintentionally.
Not childish, on the contrary: quite mature, accurate, articulate and insightful.
Mostly we fear ourselves, what we are, what we aren't, etc. Whether the dialogue is accurate or not, well, that's up to us individually, and so is what we do with it.
Situations and experiences can hold a mirror up to us - so to speak - wherein we're forced to confront these fears of ourselves. It's interesting that the Steve persona did that to you. I doubt it was intentional on his part, just part of who he was, a part of the legacy he had created and you.
99% of corporate executives and celebrities are underwhelming in actuality. You find yourself saying, "I could do that" or at least, "I know someone who could do his job". And you know what? Most of the time, that sense is right. The people on the top of society's heap are generally not more interesting or talented than the average HN poster-- possibly less so.
Steve Jobs is not in that category. His combination of vision, discipline, and courage is unusual.
The talk about "Bad Steve" reminds me about Gundotra telling the "Icon Ambulance" story the day that Steve stepped down, in which Steve calls him up on a Sunday because "we have an urgent issue" involving the color gradient on the Google iphone icon.
For many people, that kind of anal attention to detail (and describing it as an "urgent" matter) would be the key sign of a "bad" boss. I think it's acceptable in Steve because if anyone has shown a good grasp of the cost-benefit analysis of such perfection, it's him.
I don't think that's really justified. Jobs had a long career, and only two real industry-dominating hits: the Apple II (most of which was Woz's work) and the iPhone. A lot of the hyperbole we're seeing right now is because Jobs had the mis/fortune to die at the very peak of his hit.
Had we all been doing the same analysis in the mid-90's when NeXT was failing and Pixar a mostly academic curiosity, I doubt anyone would be talking about how great a judge of the "cost-benefit analysis of perfection" he was.
I'd say at least five. The Macintosh was also an industry-dominating hit. While the Mac itself never dominated in terms of market share, it so dominated the market that almost all PCs shipped in the last 20 years are imitations of it. The iPod pretty much took over the portable music player market and remains the dominant player today. And finally the iPad pretty much created the tablet market and everybody else is still trying to catch up to it there.
I think you have a good point about the timing of all of this. However, Steve was consistently and shockingly successful for the past decade and a half, which I think is more than enough time to say that these qualities aren't just an artifact of timing.
While NeXT might have been a commercial failure, the vast majority of entrepreneurs can only dream of having such a business once in their lifetime. In the end, NeXT was acquired by Apple and the foundation of their operating system became what is now OS X. NeXT would not be called a failure if any other person had founded it - it just seems less successful by comparison in the light of Jobs' other endeavors.
If NeXT hadn't produced a pre-emptively multitasking, memory protected, highly object oriented operating system and software development ecosystem, NeXT wouldn't have been acquired by Apple, and Apple wouldn't have had the key technology that has powered every major success they've had outside of the iPod in the last 10 years.
Remember that Apple wasn't shopping for Jobs, they were shopping for a modern OS; they only turned to NeXT after Gassée fucked-up their deal to buy Be.
Financially NeXT was a wash, the $400 million paid for it was enough to pay back most of the investors, so they got their money back but no profit.
For Apple, having the NeXT talent and what became OSX, it was a success for them. So NeXT had value - it was not a "-1" as a company going bankrupt would be.
Yeah; if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, I don't think it would be considered a failure. Maybe not a great success, but certainly no one would consider it a bad thing.
And if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, and the technologies pioneered at it went on to power almost every major product Google released for the following 15 years, people would consider it a deeply influential and successful company.
People seem to grade NeXT on a very, very steep curve.
NeXT is a confusing company to judge. They were slowly dying for years, then suddenly Apple came along and rescued them. Except it turned out that it was NeXT who rescued Apple. But all the subsequent stuff was done under the Apple name, so people just remember the NeXT that built extremely expensive computers, didn't sell very many of them, and nearly went bust before being bought out.
Wouldn't Pixar count as "industry-dominating"? It may be too early to tell, but I'd bet money the iPad will also end up in that category.
The man took a company that was going out of business and turned it into the largest company in the world. I don't think this talk is "hyperbole" in the least.
Pixar is beyond "industry-dominating". They basically invented the (CG film) industry. When Steve first acquired Pixar he was losing $1 million/year. It takes a true visionary to realize the potential in an idea and work through what to most would seem like an insurmountable challenge.
I think it's more than the just the Apple II and the iPhone. The way I see it, the man's main hobby was disruption. He disrupted the PC industry with the Apple II and later the Mac line. He disrupted the music industry with the iPod and iTunes, and the phone industry with the iPhone. He changed the animation industry with Pixar one of the most successful, both financially, and critically acclaimed movie company. He revived an industry which most considered a dead horse with the iPad and where most companies are still playing catch-up.
I agree if this was to happen back in the 90s, he wouldn't be as praised as he is today, but what does that have to do with anything? If I was to judge anyone before their greatest moments, they wouldn't pass the bar. And yeah, he was kind of an ass in his early days, but by most accounts he became a lot more mellow when returning to Apple.
The PC industry is working just fine, and a Mac and PC are more similar than they are different.
The music industry has hardly changed due to the iPod, you sell one way you sell another - that's not disruption.
And the phone industry most certainly did not change, it's just an incremental improvement on the fancy phones that have been getting steadily better. The iPhone may be great, but fundamentally it's just a better version of what was already there.
His business was taking an idea and perfecting it so people liked and used it. But it was not disruption.
But I'd say iTunes (music store) was disruptive. It changed how the music industry operated.
The iphone changed how we 'use' phones more than it changed the 'phone industry'. In fact, on writing that, I think that captures what Apple does best, it 'disrupts' how people perceive and use a product, that may in-turn distrupt an industry, but that is a consequence, not the goal (for Apple).
I see the iPhone as popularizing the smartphone concept, but not fundamentally disrupting the concept of phones and their usage. Palm I think was the real disruptor there, but Apple perfected it.
I think you nailed it quite well, it is not about WHAT he did, but HOW he did it. Disruption was his way of doing things. And it matches quite well his "Think Different" heros, all of them were disrupters.
We could argue about the domination of the Mac or the impact and legacy of NeXT and Pixar, but...
You really don't think the iPod was an industry-dominating hit? They sold hundreds of millions of them, and no other company ever really came up with a successful answer to them. It was left to Apple itself to kill them with the iPhone.
The ipod was around for three years before it took off in sales, and there were plenty of other music players available at the time that were more popular and had better functionality. Most of the iPod's initial success wasn't because of anything innovative about the product, but because of very, very savvy marketing.
It's very interesting to watch all this historical revisionism that paints Jobs as the mysterious shadowy figure that was the creator of the digital portable music device, which was a boom product from day 1. Don't forget, Apple has also had several flops over the past decade, but no-one remembers them because of selective bias.
Jobs was an incredible man, but let's see him for what he did; don't turn him into a myth.
I'm a programmer. 3-4 years ago, I bought an iRiver. It got great reviews, it was supposedly better than an iPod, and you could put Real Rhapsody music on it. I literally spent over an hour attempting to load music on it, and failed. It used some kind of Windows Media Player plugin to load music with an interface from hell. I never even attempted to load Rhapsody music on it, god knows if it would have worked.
The iPod didn't win by accident, or cause of marketing. Sometimes the best product wins.
Not sure why this got downmodded. The ipod came out in 2001. It didn't really take off until 2004. The guy I'm responding to is talking about UX from 2007-08, well after the maturation of the digital music player. iRiver sucking in 2007 does not mean that the iPod didn't suck in 2002.
iPod's chief competition at the time was the Nomad (as captured in Rob Malda's classic iPod review).
I bought a Nomad in August 2001 (roughly two months before the iPod came out). I have never had more remorse at being an early adopter.
The Nomad was the size of two Sony CD Walkmans stuck together. Its interface was a series of four fiddly buttons and a dire lo-res LCD screen. The iPod was a tremendous improvement in every single respect.
The reason why the iPod wasn't an immediate hit was because it was only available for the Mac. iTunes for Windows didn't get released until 2003.
If the iPod sucked in 2002, every other hard-drive based MP3 player sucked more.
This discussion was regarding whether or not the iPod counted as a dominant product line under Jobs. What particular year an iRiver anecdotally sucked, or whether the initial batch of iPods were as good as those brick sized Nomads is completely irrelevant to the fact that the iPod product line decimated every competitor in the market over its lifespan.
You can not be serious. It shows up as an external hard drive. Copy your music over. Done. But maybe you've never used a floppy disk or flash drive? I could see it being confusing then.
Did you ever own a non-iPod MP3 player? The user experience on those devices was usually terrible (especially navigating through songs without a scroll wheel). Loading songs onto those players was painful, or at least nowhere near as simple as iTunes (especially once Apple bought SoundJam).
Additionally, Jobs' relentless addition/pruning of the iPod lines (mini/shuffle/nano/color/touch/etc) kept Apple with both a streamlined offering and ~70% market share.
I'm not arguing that the first ("less space than a nomad") iPod was a revolutionary device at launch. But dismissing the iPod's success as "savvy marketing" is doing the device a huge disservice.
Yes, I owned several MP3 players of the era, one of them an iPod video. I found the ipod at the time to be one of the most frustrating to load media onto - as one memorable example, it wouldn't let me load .mp4s into the 'TV' folder, because .mp4s are 'Movies'. No argument will be entered into. wtf?
Loading music was no better or worse than other players I had, but iTunes was still horrendous bloatware. Why do I need to install Quicktime - absolutely and utterly useless to me - to simply move files from hard drive to ipod?! Some MP3 players I had just let you drag and drop with a file explorer and they would 'just work', plus you could use the software to do it 'properly' if you felt like. One chinese knock-off I had simply played the songs in the order you copied them on, which was weird :) Then there's things like radios - ipod had none, despite it being a clear feature people wanted for years.
But yes, I had several MP3 players of the era, and the ipod was nothing special in terms of user experience. The hardware case was pretty, admittedly.
People are viewing the early digital music player market with the rosy-coloured glasses of historical revisionism. Apple are top dog now, so it somehow stands to reason they always were? Logical fallacy. The early ipods weren't great, and it wasn't Apple out there leading us all into the digital music new world, there was a passel of competitors.
I think you also underestimate marketing - higher market share does not mean that the product is inherently better (betamax vs VHS, anyone? Or the OS war of your choice?). Apple has an incredible marketing team, and frankly good marketing does mean something significant, or there wouldn't be so much money in it.
Weird. After reading this, I'm not sure you come from the same planet I do.
I literally had the exact opposite experience you did. I couldn't afford an iPod when it was released, so I bought the Chinese knock-off. Several, actually -- I worked at Circuit City at the time and got an incredible employee discounts on them. And all had horrendous software, as well as plenty of hardware glitches. The software rarely worked as advertised and I usually had to resort to some sort of hack or third party program to get MP3's loaded in any sort of format I wanted them to work in.
It wasn't until years later when I could finally afford an iPod Mini that I finally found an MP3 player that worked on even a basic serviceable level. I still have that iPod mini, and it works perfect. If I didn't have an iPhone already, that would be my MP3 player for when I work out.
If you're speaking to computer know-how and aptitude, I am a programmer today, so I do not feel it is my ability that held me back.
It's not entirely fair to compare the top-of-the-line product to a bottom-of-the-line product. Before the iPod even existed I had a Creative Nomad with an eight megabyte SmartMedia card. It worked, and faithfully played one single low-bitrate album at a time for years. Still would if I bothered to dig it out of the closet.
Other than offering more capacity (years later at a higher price), the iPod really wasn't radically better than my old Nomad. I'll grant that the iPod was a great product, but it wasn't a revolutionary product in the way that the iPhone was. The iPod is certainly better than the absolute worst of the market, but it was only a little better than the best of the market at the time.
The chinese knock-off was only mentioned because of it's weird play order: physical order on the disk, not any way of ordering songs by metadata or filename. That particular MP3 player wasn't very good, from memory.
MP3 players sucked. You had to manually copy music onto them or use the absolutely crappy music libraries that came with them.
With the iPod you have your nicely organized music library and you sync it with your device. For the vast majority of people that so much better than manually copying music. I would never want to go back to the world where I copied music manually.
I agree on the marketing being important, but I remember thinking at the time it first came out that the iPod was by far the smallest hard disk mp3 player I'd seen - the first that might be practical for the non-geek market. Were there others around that time that I'm not aware of?
This idea of people as heroes or villains strikes me as being myopic. The very idea that people can be either good or bad shows that we're all just mushrooms growing out of a much larger mycelium.
Ever notice that so many of the most popular American tourist destinations are places like machu picchu, the great wall of china, the pyramids, etc? The fact that these places exist says far less about their creators than it does about the societies that produced them. (Although perhaps the fact that Americans are obsessed with the monuments of slavery and fascism says something about us.)
I always thought that was a terrible argument. So they weren't slaves like blacks in the US south, but they could have still been slaves.
Slaves can have skill, families and pride in their work. Historically some slaves were trusted to go out on their own and do business for their owner, and not run away!
Some slaves became so important to their master than they actually inherited the estate when the master died.
So they may have been high level slaves, but slaves nonetheless.
"So they weren't slaves like blacks in the US south, but they could have still been slaves."
Relationships are complicated, maybe its best not to put labels on things.
In all seriousness though, regardless of what their specific status was, most societies where people are building things like pyramids tend to be pretty messed up.
A slave is someone who does not have permission to chose his own work, and does not have permission to (or is prevented from) quiting. (Note that I said permission, not ability.)
A slave can still be paid.
Based on my definition of slave I believe the pyramids were built by slaves.
What evidence do you have that the pyramid builders did not have permission to quit? Its just as likely that they saw it as a huge honour to work on a pharoah's tomb. c.f. French cathedral builders
High-skill slaves have a strong presence in history. Romans bought Greek slaves for their literacy, and the Ottoman Empire had slaves who managed to work in substantially high-skill intellectual jobs, but were still slaves.
"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." Bernard Shaw
> I would like that quote more if it read 'Therefore all innovation'
I feel that progress implies innovation. Shaw's quote was meant to be general and universal, applying to crazy inventors as well Women who wanted to vote, and people of color who wanted equal rights. All of these people probably seemed unreasonable to their peers at one point.
I have always thought that quote was ridiculous. What is unreasonable about noticing an improvement can be made in your surroundings, and endeavouring to make it?
There is a grain of truth I suppose, vis-a-vis humanity's general restlessness, fixing what ain't broke, etc, but I think that this generalisation that anyone who isn't perfectly happy and satisfied with the exact present state of things is "unreasonable" is not true at all.
> What is unreasonable about noticing an improvement can be made in your surroundings, and endeavouring to make it?
I guess if the Steve Jobs aquarium urban legend didn't sound unreasonable, you probably have the silicon valley mindset. It's really easy to think of the current state of things and to feel that everything done up to now is 'reasonable'; especially if you live in a really progressive, techno-friendly place like Silicon Valley. You need to know the historical context from the perspective of an average non-technical person in places that aren't as open minded and progressive. One example would be an average person wondering why people wasted their time making unreliable experimental horseless carriages when clearly horses were superior. I also can't help but think of the author of Gulliver's Travels making fun of people experimenting with electricity.
Being dissatisfied isn't what was considered unreasonable. Thinking that changing the world is easier than changing your expectations is what is considered unreasonable. From a frequentist statistical point of view, that is true. But some people are outliers who are able to bend the world to their will.
I worked for an overly demanding boss and would not want to repeat that experience. He was demanding in a petty way about things that didn't matter such as turning up the temperature of the thermostat in Winter when it got too cold. It was due to insecurity and ego that this boss went on his power trips.
I would have loved to work for Steve Jobs as he's passionate and demanding about things that do matter. The perfection makes a difference in the product rather than making a difference in his ego.
I've wondered about this myself - while I admire his accomplishments greatly, the stories of the kind of fear and admiration of Steve as a boss makes me wonder if that type of personality would have jived well with my wanting constructive feedback and positive reinforcement. It appears that in his later years (2000s), he attributed credit to his team and thanked them for hard work whenever he introduced a major product.
I imagine you're right, but so what? A lot of excellent people are unpleasant in person in some circumstances. There's a lot more to being praiseworthy than simply being a nice person.
I'll bet some of the people who willingly did so for years didn't really like "working for Steve". If you get enough satisfaction out of the results, though, that doesn't really matter as much.
People sometimes stay in otherwise intolerably boring jobs for years because they really like their bosses and/or coworkers, and sometimes they stay in incredibly exciting and fulfilling jobs for years despite loathing same.
I've worked with dictators (kitchen chefs in very high end restaurants) since I was 13.. First I hated it then it got to me.. If you're truly passionate about something, and its your life mission, not much else matters.
Working for him in a mentor/protege context with mutual respect and trust would have been (despite the immense difficulty and enormous high expectations) a great opportunity. Working for him as just a regular VP? Not as much. Probably not worth the stress.
The class that includes Edison and Jobs is the class that wins the recognition and respect of the general public, including my 80 year old aunt who has never used an Apple product. I guess of doesn't really matter though, if the luminaries and some of their fans choose not to care what the public thinks.
The nice thing about choosing your own definition of success is that we can congratulate both Jobs and Woz for their success even though they reached incredibly divergent outcomes and there is no way they could have ever both reached the same point.
It could be, but I've heard this same story told about a Sony exec. instead of Steve, and that was before iPod's time. It was a camera that he dropped into a body of water though. The rest is same.
Doing as exhaustive of a search as I could, I found a couple of interesting things. The Sony version of the parable seems to center on the Walkman (as opposed to a camera), which was built in the late 1970s, and either Akio Morita or Masaru Ibuka (co-founders of Sony). However, the earliest reference on the Internet to it I can find is from September 2002 [^1], about a year after the iPod was released, making its origins inconclusive. The fact that it is linked to multiple founders of powerful technology companies suggests to me that it is apocryphal.
Well, the story might well be completely made up, but the chances are higher that it was made up about Sony not Apple. Probably around the time of when the first Walkman was released.
Let's not forget that early Apple was modelled after Sony of the time. Also, under the context of Japanese culture the kind of attitude displayed by the 'boss' in the story is less striking or unusual.
Funny that both devices cannot really be made without air in them.
That first iPod had a hard disk. Hard disks have disk heads that float on air.
Typical lenses aren't flat at the back; CCDs or films are. You could fill that void with glass with a different index of refraction, but that would only make the thing heavier, not smaller.
Hard disks are not sealed. Disks from the 1960s were. Then engineers realized they could dramatically reduce the amount of structural bracing if they left a "breathing hole" open and allow air pressure to equalize. This is why all hard drives have that little 2mm dot labeled "Warning do not cover!".
Even more amusingly, hard drives need that air inside to operate and they won't work at high altitudes.
Couldn't this mean a number of things? 1. The device isn't fully sealed. 2. Isn't there always going to be air unless you cover each area of the device and seal it off?
I think you missed the point by a couple light years. Air escaping means there's room in the case for air to be in the first place. Air molecules aren't magic, and can't occupy the same space as other objects.
The point is not that you must create a product which contains no air. The point is that, as long as it does contain air, it can be made smaller. It may be difficult, it may be impractical, but it can be done.
Talking about how there's always going to be some air is completely missing the point. The point is that you can always push things a little further.
Air bubbles would escape and you would have to make it smaller. That was a really stupid question.
Yes, sometimes I wish I could be Steve and herd the Geek community. I could make a shippable Linux that consumers would pay for. Gnome, KDE, Unity... Hey, let's call it LibreOffice... get it?
Geeks should try to think like normal humans... All that effort could actually change the world.
The point was that Steve wanted it smaller so he made a dramatic gesture to demonstrate to the engineers that he would not accept no for an answer.
Steve understood what is important in a product, and more importantly, what is not. The Linux community, for example, has spent many years divided, building several window managers and hundreds of distros, never focusing on what is really important to consumers, in general. The iPad already has more Internet market share than desktop Linux in a very short period of time.
Was that better guys? Personally I like my first response better. Definitely had more flavor, but hey, this is HN and one needs to tread lightly.
This article along with the New Yorker's piece rank as the best I've read since he died. He was an amazing man, and changed my life and many others', but not perfect.
Maybe my ego is sturdier now, because I wonder if I wouldn't have enjoyed the challenges he set people. One thing is for sure, you could know that if you did what he wanted, it wasn't going to be a me-too product.