I think that an important distinction has to be made about this kind of people. Unlike many journalists, and 'futurists' out there, trying to predict what the future will be like, people like Jobs and Gates[1] do not make bold predictions, just for the sake of making them. Instead they have a vision and they work to make that vision real.
That's the reason of why, when they speak, sometimes the things they tell may seem to be a little bit odd at the time, but eventually that things became real.
There are a few examples of this in the interview made by AllThingsD to Gates and Jobs together in 2007. [1] At 35:30 Gates said that he was sure the tablet market was about to explode (while jobs was looking at him with a funny poker face), and later, he basically described Kinnect, a few years before Project Natal was made public.
If Google haven't revealed Glass or their autonomous cars, and Larry or Sergey came out speaking about driver-less cars, and wearable devices, some would think that they are dreaming, but the truth is that they are describing their vision, and they are working to make it real.
It's like what jobs said at min 43, when asked about 5 years from 2007 (yeah, right now!). And he said: "I don't know, " [...] "but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there".
They are not wizards, they happen to know what currently exists, and what's being developed. So, instead of making weird assumptions (like: "ok, assuming that we will develop a material 1000 times stronger, 100 times lighter and 10 times cheaper, we'll have X in ten years"), they rationalize about what's the logical evolution of the technology, based on what they know.
Exactly! As Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".
I don't find it is so important that people like Jobs, Gates, Brin, etc. have sometimes correctly predicted the future. What is important is that they executed, and turned these predictions to reality. Even more. They turned these predictions to everyday reality for most people, instead of a select few.
It annoys me when these people are compared to people who just throw a million ideas around and then, when one of these ideas becomes reality, they claim that they are so good at predicting the future.
That quote came to my mind, while I was writing my comment, and I think it's magnificent. I love it, because it basically tells you: Don't lay there just dreaming about the future, go out and build the future!
Plus they have tons of data available from market research that capture various trends and what people are looking for even if they (the people) can’t express it product wise. I believe that 9 out of 10 products that we call innovative aren’t just invented out of the blue. They are the result of meticulous observation of trends and users' habits.
Not in Jobs case. He had absolutely nothing good to say about market research. He was a strong believer in the adage that if you asked what people wanted out of a car back in 1900 they'd just describe a better horse.
Gates on the other hand was a big believer in market research and focus groups. I think that's why he was so into pen computing. He was unable to get past the windowing, desktop, pointing device paradigm.
While they weren't invented out of the blue, I don't think most of them come from meticulous observation of trends and market research.
Rather I think what happens is that some technology matures, and then some people that are familiar with that technology are able to recognize that it can be made into a real product that has market potential.
These people don't need market research, because from their standpoint, with their knowledge, it's "obvious". Eg. if you knew about the internet and email in the 80s, it would be obvious that it would replace telex at some point, even though you might be off with the timing of that transition.
This tape really is worth listening to for anyone who was not involved with computers in 1983. Jobs clearly sees what is happening in the home computer revolution. He's not alone in that, many of us at that time realized that the computer was going to take over everywhere.
Around that time I worked on a project for a company that made machines to stick labels on product packets. Those machines were electromechanical and worked but were quite inflexible. I was asked to prototype a computer control of one of the machines and wrote the code by hand and demonstrated that not only was computer control cheaper and smaller it was way more flexible. For example, the electromechanical machines were unable to detect when there was a missing sticker on the roll of stickers to be applied to the products. It was trivial with computer control (and an IR detector) to add that functionality.
The machine was a 6502-based box whose interface was a hex keypad and a 6 digit seven segment display. You typed your program in in hex and ran out, but it and enough I/O channels to run the machine.
He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was any inkling of the Internet going mainstream. Yet he specifically talks about early e-mail systems and how it is re-shaping communication. He matter-of-factly states that when we have portable computers with radio links, people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. Again, this is 1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing.
Meanwhile, and also in 1983, Steve Roberts was traveling across the US with his computer-on-a-bike and checking his email across CompuServ using satellite links, so actually doing it: http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html
I seem to remember that the satellite links came later, in 1983 the Winnebiko only had CB radio for communication (no email) and an audio-casette deck to store what he was writing on his stops.
Winnebiko 2 added packet radio for email in 1986-88, but I don't think the satellite links came until Behemoth which was in the 1990s.
I thank Mozilla almighty for Firefox' 'Inspect Element' feature allowing me to block that intrusive element full of social networking cruft that was obscuring much of the content. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't attempt to read this article at all.
Presumably some browser/window size configurations wouldn't have a chunk of article text blocked by an obnoxious window demanding I shill this article on a bunch of websites I never visit, so I figure it's bad website design rather than an intentional retro throwback to 1998-style popup-heavy browsing, but still - if you made that site, and you're reading this, make it not happen anymore.
oh boy aren't you smart. the old "just marketing" troll.
all you need to make an mp3 player successful is marketing.
all you need to make a smartphone successful is marketing.
all you need to make notebooks successful is marketing.
my god, it is so simple!
fire all the designers, engineers, coders, all the fucking nerds and replace them with marketing people! brilliant. this is exactly how you become one of the most valuable companies on this planet.
quick, call HP, Dell and Nokia to tell them about this grandiose insight!
In the interest of backing up my statement and sticking to my guns:
Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT industry with many rising competitors. That is it.
That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.
Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.
They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing everyone on the way down.
My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products and ripped off other people's work persistently.
The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.
The hype and popularity exists because Apple has produced very compelling products. The iPod and the iPhone were both leaps and bounds ahead of the competition at their launch. It's also clear that Jobs was the driving force behind their vision.
You say that "even [you]" waited on Apple announcements because "they usually stepped up the game" which translates into the fact that Apple made better/interesting/more innovative products. Note you didn't say "even I waited on Apple news announcements because their marketing was so amazing."
You say that Lumias are treading on their "innovation" territory. Not their marketing territory, their innovation territory.
If it was all marketing, they would still be winning by your argument. Has their marketing dramatically changed in the past few years?
The only rational way to reconcile this is by you saying "oh, by marketing, I mean the whole product package, user interface, software, and hardware design". In which case, you just are simply defining marketing wrong.
The iPod and iPhone were not leaps and bounds ahead. That is a common misconception which is powered by the marketing hype. There were other products out there which were far superior. Archos produced better music players and Nokia produced far better phones under the Symbian banner.
The differentiator was the marketing hype.
They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on them. That is still marketing.
Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.
Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.
Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser (with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch browser, you'd know there is no comparison.
I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor (unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.
Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But, in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia phones, and apparently, so did the market.
The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).
Apple however made it successful through marketing.
And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)
How many people need to tell you you're wrong? Google "smartphone 2007" and take a look at the iPhone's competition at the time. The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead because it focused on the features more users care about most. It's no coincidence that the other smartphones of 2007 look like ancient relics and the iPhone looks like a modern phone.
Sure, Apple's marketing is better than that of their competitors. But good marketing and good products aren't mutually exclusive.
That said, since the original iPhone, the updates have gotten increasingly incremental, and the competitors have closed the gap.
The iPod was way ahead in terms of thickness, simplicity and battery life. Things that mattered. At the time it was a technical marvel, competing hard disk players were huge and clunky EG Creative nomad.
The iPhone was way ahead of Nokia Symbian phones in power of its web browser, display, touch sensitivity etc.
Totally agree with this. It's not that Apple did anything in particular, it's that they bring together the best of everything in a single device. Honestly, this has been their mode of operation from the beginning. They have decent vision but, at least under Jobs, execution is generally flawless.
Don't dismiss Jobsy's (or his team's) contributions out of hand. They knew that an app store was key to the success of Apple's new device, so they made minimal profit off the App store.
What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer.
On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.
I hesitate to contribute to a troll thread, but Apple is a commercialiser of technology. That involves both marketing and engineering - it's not creating a new vision, but realizing a vision.
For example, with the iPhone 5, they doubled CPU performance in a year - better than Moore's Law. It's not a new vision, but it is an engineering accomplishment.
And? The specs for the Nexus 7 out-performed the iPhone 5 - even though it was released earlier. You could argue that this is quad-core and apps need to be coded to use quad cores etc etc.
The point is that I don't understand your point.
I agree that Apple do more than marketing, but marketing is one of their greatest strengths .. prior to this Samsung trial at least.. What was a BAD PR move.
Yes, it's better than quad-core for that reason. Also smaller, lighter, uses less battery etc. We already have faster PCs; the achievement is doing so within the other constraints.
Yes, marketing is their greatest strength, but "marketing" includes more than advertising, more than design, it's also knowing what will be wanted, and making it happen. Jobs actually cited Sony as a great inspiration - and perhaps we forget now, but they did create the first commercially successful transistor radio and the walkman (also Trinitron TV and the first playstation, and a bunch of other stuff in their heyday). I would say these are close parallels to Sony with the iPod, and arguably the iPhone and iPad.
My point is that Apple doesn't do invention of new technology, but commercialization of technology. A great example is the mouse: PARC invented it, Apple commercialized it. I think it's a cool and impressive thing to commercialize technology, but it's no more than that (unless Apples starts doing fundamental research like PARC, Bell Labs and IBM used to do).
Yes, they built a mouse and shipped it as part of an integrated product, but it had been invented by others more than a decade earlier. It had even shipped in a product well before they did it. PARC is actually in pretty much the same position there that you're putting Apple - they took an existing idea and made it a bit more commercial than it had been. Englebart's mouse was unreliable and uncommerical; PARC's mouse was more practical to make, more reliable, but way too expensive; Apple's mouse was finally reliable and cheap.
Thanks - I thought Engelbart was at PARC, incorrectly. Well, I'm happy for there to be stages of commercialization, just as there are stages of invention (and not always a clear demarcation), people improving what went before is the way.
I'm not sure how you can simultaneously say: "I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game" and also "They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had".
If they "stepped up the game" then surely there is (or was) something more happening than simply "hype"?
Who knows what will happen next - maybe others have or soon will catch up and Apple will crash and burn. We'll see. Still, to dismiss a pretty remarkable run over the last decade as "just marketing" is really to miss a lot, not to mention implicitly reducing everyone else in the industry to idiots who for some bizarre reason couldn't hire a good ad agency.
Sorry I should be more clear: "stepping up the game" is their marketing innovation of delivering something then announcing it rather than the industry norm of doing it the other way round and people being bored by the time it is released.
Unfortunately they have nothing to throw out now - it's all minor improvements on something they've already sold.
None of their most "innovative products" are remarkable - it's all hype.
Not sure what you mean here, but I agree largely with the grand-parent poster. Apple are struggling to innovate and others are catching up (not just Android). So rather than try to innovate, they are litigating. In some ways it's a good sign, in other ways it's bad. The market is maturing, but Apple is struggling to keep in the driving seat - and they are being overtaken by others.
In the end, I want what's best for us all. Healthy competition.
People say "Apple just does just marketing" like marketing is easy or unimportant. But, you know what, Apple's success really is about marketing, and that's a good thing. Apple haven't made that many purely technical innovations, but what they have done is look at new technology, figure out what people might want to do with it, tweak the technology to focus on doing that thing, and then explain to people how Apple's product can help them do something they want to do. This is "marketing," it's what makes technological innovations accessible to people, and it's something Apple should be praised for.
> We had everything he said back then - it was just rather bulky. It's not a visionary statement - it's logic.
> I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert not a visionary.
Yes, in hindsight it's all so logical. Anybody could have done it, Apple was simply the first to redefine the MP3 market, the digital music distribution market, the phone market, the mobile app market, the laptop market, the tablet market, all by chance. And marketing of course. Marketing and chance, there ain't nothing more to it. Just like founding NeXT, only to buy it 10 years later to create a whole new operating system and foundation of frameworks to program it, agile enough to run on hardware ranging from smartphones to workstations, it was all Jobs' marketing genius. The same marketing genius that founded Pixar, and had Intel scrambling to pay the traditional PC manufacturers to produce the PC equivalents of MacBook Airs.
Really, Steve Jobs and Apple are all.marketing, no doubt about it... :-/
Wow that was visionary! </sarcasm> if it wasnt for the fact that Alan Kay had invented the dynabook concept in 1968 and had cardboard prototype of an ipad in 1972. And he went and helped create that vision in xerox parc.
and later went to work for apple were jobs was able to copy more of his ideas.
So yeah what a prediction say in 1983 what Alan Kay invented in 1968.
You sound bitter. So other people have thought of and built parts of what jobs' team brought together, ergo Jobs was not a visionary? You can hate Apple and SJ's personality as much as you want, but don't let it blind you. Lisa and Mac invented more over the Xerox UI than you think, plus they got the license from Xerox in a fair deal against shares.
Except that Raskin's vision for the Mac was completely different from the direction Steve took it in. That's not speculation, we know what Raskin wanted the Mac to be because he founded a separate company and implemented it as SwyftWare and later the Canon Cat. Raskin's plans for the 'Mac' interface didn't even use a GUI, it was entirely text based.
To everyone saying Steve Jobs is just a "marketer" obviously doesn't know what it takes to run a company, let alone his full genius. Now watch as Apple starts falling down.
Steve Jobs was obviously holding Apple back, only just recently did we finally get a 4 inch screen, 4G LTE, and (keep in mind he publicly decried this form factor) an iPad mini 7ish inch tablet
It's brave to say Jobsy held Apple back - he brought Apple back from the ashes.
Jobsy supposedly passed on much advice to Tim Cook - on where to go with the next few models. Jobsy may not have been against 4G LTE and a 4 inch screen - he may have recommended Tim to go down that path.
About your assertion that the 4inch iPhone is a Tim Cook idea, I doubt it. It was probably in the pipeline for 18months so I'm sure it was signed off by Jobs. Next years products are going to be the first under Tim Cook's reign.
And Steve also said that video on iPods was a stupid idea.... a year before he introduced a video iPod (so Apple must've been working on it even as he made that statement)
Is it me or is there a recent trend of more and more apple/steve jobs/ios threads? There seems to be so many of them, when ios6 came out there were quite literally a wall of related threads on the front page.
Is it because most people these days use macbooks for development?
That's the reason of why, when they speak, sometimes the things they tell may seem to be a little bit odd at the time, but eventually that things became real.
There are a few examples of this in the interview made by AllThingsD to Gates and Jobs together in 2007. [1] At 35:30 Gates said that he was sure the tablet market was about to explode (while jobs was looking at him with a funny poker face), and later, he basically described Kinnect, a few years before Project Natal was made public.
If Google haven't revealed Glass or their autonomous cars, and Larry or Sergey came out speaking about driver-less cars, and wearable devices, some would think that they are dreaming, but the truth is that they are describing their vision, and they are working to make it real.
It's like what jobs said at min 43, when asked about 5 years from 2007 (yeah, right now!). And he said: "I don't know, " [...] "but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there".
They are not wizards, they happen to know what currently exists, and what's being developed. So, instead of making weird assumptions (like: "ok, assuming that we will develop a material 1000 times stronger, 100 times lighter and 10 times cheaper, we'll have X in ten years"), they rationalize about what's the logical evolution of the technology, based on what they know.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB... , Min 28 and forward.