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?
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKx...
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.