Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently:
>Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field".
>Every. Single. Time.
>Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together.
It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.
Isaacson made several telling errors about Apple products, showing he didn't really know them--for example, he seems not to understand how NeXT technology is still the core of OS X and iOS. This is not a trivial detail, since if Jobs was all about products you're not going to understand his work if you don't understand the products.
So, Isaacson fails as a book that will help you understand Job's work, or his management style, or what he did to turn Apple around--which I think had quite a bit to do with Apple's habit of leveraging technologies across products, developing economies of scale, and having people work in small, autonomous teams.
It's still a good book, though--I think it painted a balanced picture of an obsessive and mercurial man who, slowly, almost became a normal person.
After reading his biography by Walter Isaacson. I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs.
At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made.
After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him.
Oh no no no! I thought the same about Jobs back in 1985 but everything that we've learned about him since points up how irreplaceable he was. Without Jobs, Wozniak would have been a brilliant, happy, but obscure engineer at HP, Ive talents would have been mostly wasted, and Jef Raskin would still have, maybe, gotten a shot to build the Swyft and the Archy which even in our universe are obscure. Without Jobs you would never have heard of any of them. Instead you would be claiming that Steve Jobs rode on the success of <unknown brilliant people whom Steve worked with>.
EDIT: I should be clear that I thoroughly admire Steve Wozniak (one of my first heroes), Jony Ive, and Jef Raskin.
This linked article is one of the first things that has made me think of Steve in a positive light.
I'm generally fairly negative about him because 1. I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society (producer products are the future), and I worry that if they ever 'won' or even came as close to winning as Microsoft did for a while that there would be no place for me in such a world. No plausible endgame for Apple is good for me (although they've done a lot of good in breaking the stranglehold of windows and making the concept of other OS more mainstream).
There's a little bit of 3. too, which is that most of what I've read of him makes him come across as a bit of a nightmare as a person.
Anyway, this article felt very real, and just talked about a guy with passion who left the CEO hat at the door. That would be a guy I could potentially respect.
> the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society (producer products are the future),
I think iMovie and the iMac DV phase was a period where Apple actually aspired to this, though. They obsessed over making the best possible computers and software for people to make great home movies, just as they were obsessing over Final Cut and the Power Mac for the professional market. The Mac used to have a reputation as the platform for creative people in all fields, and the "think different" campaign was an effort to reinforce that.
Unfortunately, most people don't want to be creative and Apple had an opportunity to pursue the consumer market. They still try, with Garageband and iPhoto and iMovie, but it's less of a focus.
> #2 the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products (...) producer products are the future.
In one sense, Apple has encourage people to be producers by making it easier to produce financially-viable software. Are you comparing Apple's vision with Microsoft's, or do you have something else in mind?
> I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society (producer products are the future)
But producers produce products for consumers to consume. You can't just eliminate the consumer side of the equation. Without one there isn't the other.
> But producers produce products for consumers to consume.
Not necessarily. You can be a producer for yourself. I think the GP is arguing that technologies like 3D printing and practices like home gardening will flourish in the near future. Rather than buy stuff per se, people will buy equipment and tools that allow them to produce for themselves the stuff they would have bought.
> that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2
> were made
This sound like Apple was happening at some garage and Jobs and Wozniak were just walking by.
Did the same happen with NeXT and Pixar?
Jobs was responsible for Apple happening, and he was also responsible for Wozniak being at Apple.
You may not like the guy, but denying that he had a visions is silly.
Videos available online show that he envisioned what he have now back in 1995 or even 1987.
Catmull and Lasseter are the main geniuses behind Pixar. Jobs came in later and provided a lot of money to keep the dream alive (which shouldn't be underestimated) and apparently did some amazing negotiation with Disney but the initial spark of genius came from those two (and many other talented people they worked with).
True, but genius is not enough. Jobs seemed to have a quality that acted as a catalyst for genius to do 'great' stuff (where 'great' is debatable, of course).
Based on my personal experience with 'Jobsian' types, I have found this to be true as well. I've met many people who were brilliant at things, but under these types, even those with less brilliance often performed better. Anecdotal evidence, true, but still. My point is that it is fine to acknowledge their genius AND that he might have played a more important role than just money/power.
To be fair, he looked at what was happening in research and thought "I can make this happen in the market" – all the ingredients were there in PARC, etc. That he was able to fixate on that goal and make it happen, however, is a triumph.
I don't think that's quite it. It wasn't simply about taking it to market, it's seeing research that you know needs to be in a product because you want to use it right now.
I get that feeling a lot from research, concepts, and so on. I end up building the products I want to use, and it turns out that's a really good way to build something people like.
The way you word it makes it sound like it's all about selling things to other people — where I really believe that Steve Jobs under Apple and NeXT was designing the computers, devices and software that he personally wanted to exist. Selling them was a way to continue to fund that process.
But I have to wonder if Jobs manipulated Isaacson so people would worry less about Apple after his passing away? Isaacson's book was very poorly done and offered very few actual insights other than Jobs getting to see his father. In fact after I read Inside Apple I was left wondering how Isaacson got away with writing something so lightweight.
I was rather disappointed too. Maybe his approach was the only one that would provide a good story for non-techies, but I didn't like it. But then I'm a geek.
So what's it actually like working with Steve Jobs?
Half joking aside, it would have been nice if the author would have spent more than 1/5th of the article actually talking about what he claimed he was going to give insight on. Instead the author spent most of the article tooting his own horn, which is fine, if that's what the title had indicated to expect.
You don't know Glenn. He's a natural story teller and while proud of what he's done, he recognizes that he's just one of many people trying to create something that hasn't been created before. In reading into his comments of his history with Steve, you're viewing him as intentionally pumping up his own story. The truth is he's trying very hard to be honest with the listener as to his comings and goings with Apple and with Steve.
He worked with him closely, then stepped away and came back. Multiple times. By telling the story of this, he lets readers know that he wasn't always by his side and that he left to try other things but circled back at different junctures in his life and in Steve's.
Knowing Glenn and his successes and failures and talking with him over many a margarita at Compadres (after long bouts of writing NeXTSTEP code with him), the story brought strong memories and a very clear voice of different periods and circumstances across several years. He shows an arc of ups and downs in both careers and a lot of hard work and sweat that often didn't get notice until many years later if at all.
Rereading the story, I don't get boastful at all. I get much appreciation for being able to be on a pretty cool ride and being able to create some great products. There's also disappointment in some hard work that didn't pay off. But above all appreciation for someone who continually rolled up his sleeves to get in the ring, take chances, and build something... or in this case tell a damn good story.
Yeah, but here's the only sentence that really talks about "what it's like working with Steve":
"Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. "
Yes, I kept reading about the author's feats and glory thinking "well, great, but... let me check the title again". Apparently, a fair amount of ego rubs off on you when you work with Steve Jobs :)
Between this and the Safari story, I'm struck at just how deep Apple's internal secrecy ethos runs. The idea that there is that level of dedication to keeping a project hidden, not just from outsiders, but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind.
It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.
You know I have almost the opposite take. As important as secrecy is to them, and for how big and rich they are, they seem very sloppy at times. We've seen them tip their hat with user agent strings out of the cupertino offices, shipping retina resources before the retina machine is announced, etc.
I personally feel that projects can benefit from more input and more opportunity for constructive criticism. That said, I also don't run the largest company in the US, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to make a judgment call there.
I think that Apple tends to be a bit echo-chambery, but they've historically built solid stuff, so it's hard to criticize their development methodology too heavily. It'll be interesting to see how that contrasts with changes in their corporate ethos in a post-Jobs era.
There's no real knowledge to be gained with this line of questioning. There aren't many companies like Apple which makes it very hard to run controlled studies or do thorough research.
Also the markets they helped define have changed dramatically as a result of their involvement. So many variables... The best we can really say for now is this is Apple's history as known to outsiders. They accomplished these results. Take it as a data point.
There is only ONE thing that a maps product absolutely has to get right, and that's the data. It's the core of the whole product.
It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with the device, depend on to help them in a confusing situation.
Yeah, well, maybe I'm the only one, but apple maps work fine for me. Massive improvement over the old maps experience. Google regularly got a ton of things wrong, even in urban areas like San Francisco, so I give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to minor mistakes.
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.
Within a week of its launch, I used the product in three different cities and multiple less urban locations on the east and west coasts. I had no major problems.
I'm know there were problems with maps, but a lot of the teeth gnashing was/is exaggerated drama. Google routinely places silly things at the corner of Van Ness and Market, because it has no idea where they belong -- you just don't hear about it because nobody nitpicks Google Maps the way they did Apple's launch.
I beg to disagree. I was surprised that Apple Maps also get the information granularity completely wrong, that is the amount of data presented at a zoom level. This, and not the data, made the app uttterly unusable for me on a recent trip to Hong Kong. I could either see the overview of the area I was in with no street names for all the minor streets around me, which made it unusable. Or I could zoom in and finally see the smaller street names, but lose all overview. Also unusable.
It seems like they could have just copied Gmaps for that... I sure hope they fix it soon.
Try navigating Thailand without any English street names and descriptions. Nothing to do with the Maps language setting, everything to do with the data. Maybe it's been fixed now with a new data set?
Initially I thought that the secrecy was only to shield information from flowing outside of the company but if you dig deeper there is a much more useful side-affect. If you are part of a 4 member team that is working in a 10,000+ employee organization, it is very easy to get lost in the bureaucracy, processes and fooling yourself that being busy is the same as being productive. However, by making your work secret; it effectively limits what you can talk about with other people within the organization and limits other people from butting into it. This allows the 4-member team to focus on their work, talk to one key person at the top to get through large-organization bureaucracies and be as effective as a 4-person startup.
The military calls it "need to know basis". From the perspective of keeping secrets, it would be pretty dumb if you let every PFC in the army access diplomatic cables that had little to do with his actual duties.
>but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind.
I've worked at Apple before and it wasn't that different to every other large corporation. Excluding obviously the hardware design and critical features. But everything else was par for the course.
EVERY large company has politics and empire building. Especially when you are a multinational and have a driven workforce.
I'd speculate that it's less about politics and empires, and more about not getting too many cooks in the kitchen. It's easy to blur the vision for your product when you have opinions coming in from five thousand people, never mind having the entire world speculate and discuss the product that doesn't yet exist.
Think back to May 2007. Remember some of the iPhone mockups people were throwing around? Aside from being largely impractical and stupid, there was clearly no "right" way to do it that was obvious to everyone, as the mocks were so incredibly varied. At some point, you have to make a bet on what the best way to proceed is and go with it, or else you'll spend all day debating and not actually get anything done. That's far easier in small, "secretive" groups.
I've only worked at small (<100 employees) companies, so I guess I've just never run into this. It's a little sad to think that you could work alongside someone and have to consider them a threat rather than an ally.
I think that's a cynical view of it. Like your sibling post from Firehed says, it's probably more about "not getting too many cooks in the kitchen" than being territorial, as well as preventing the poison of uninformed public opinion from killing a project before it was released.
In theory that is false, in practice it is less clear (at least to me). The ranking (and subsequent curve fitting known formally as calibration) is done across a level-band (bascially 'job title') across a much wider scope than a single team (i.e. across a division). The idea that your co-workers are actively plotting to somehow take some reward from you come review time is a poor caricature of reality. Does it happen? Possibly, Microsoft is a huge company. Is it common? Not based on my experience and conversations with others in different parts of the company. Anecdotally I have heard 0 credible stories about it from anyone willing to put their name behind it (i.e. I have seen anonoymous posts on minimicrosoft, but more on that in the next sentence). Also minimicrosoft has a clear selection bias as people don't go their to chat about how much they love various aspects of Microsoft culture. Citing that as evidence is like citing a Tobacco company research paper on the effects of smoking, questions on impartiality have to be considered. That said, and as I pointed out in my first sentence, I have no insight into the actual going-ons in stack-ranking meetings, so for all I know it could be horse-trading and petty-politics and curve-fitting on a per-team basis. That would be immensely stupid, and I don't get the impression that accurately models reality, though what the exact granularity between team of 10 and division of a thousand is, I don't know. There are other things about the Microsoft review system to dislike before curve-fitting, but it is certainly up there, and probably the most publically known aspect.
Can't you see that what you cite is exactly the problem? The people in your level band, including the ones in your hallway that you work with every day, are your competition.
I was a dev in Windows from 2008 to late 2011. Many comments from Mini MSFT resonated with me. My review history was never bad, but knowing precisely who in my peer group got more money (by watching title changes) and knowing which talented, hardworking devs got shafted (by private conversations) was really bad for my morale. Every review period I'd reliably see the same set of folks (manager's favorites) get regular title changes for doing crap work, and the same bright hardworking people doing the "real work" would be given some lame excuse (if not outright set up for failure) and told to just reach a little higher next year. It stings.
Never mind the outright stupidity of a system where a theoretical "dream team" of 10 hardworking, talented, best in class individuals would need to have 1 go without a bonus every year.
Maybe they'll be more diplomatic than what I'm writing, but I don't know anyone at Microsoft whose opinion I respect that won't concede these points or admit that there's a problem.
Sorry it is so hard to read, most of my posts here are casual thought not elaborately structured rhetoric. Rewriting it to better please you is not high on my list of things to do at the moment, so, pass.
I felt the same way as the GP. It's not about better pleasing one person. It's about investing an extra minute or two yourself to save all of the readers a total amount of time that exceeds that. Writing unstructured text in a discussion forum isn't good netiquette.
>"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M"
and
>"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."
I found the second one strange since I'd also read this, with my empasis added:
"Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, __he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.__"
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
This second quote is part of what is now called design thinking and the "ideation" process. Take all input - no criticism allowed at this point - put everything on the table, and discuss as a group. It's very effective, generates more diverse ideas and prevents people from clinging to their own (I plead guilty).
"I think it was October or November of 1998" ..
"The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers."
Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out around late 1998.
I doubt anyone actually owned the Sony Mavica for their own "personal" uses. It ran out of battery after 30 pictures or so, and you needed to carry around a bunch of floppies. My crappy disposable camera could take better pictures than that thing.
I'm not sure if I would consider the 3.5" floppy disk as a "relevant sized mass storage" but 1.4mb was probably pretty big in those days. When I bought windows 95, it came in 28 floppy disks.
Around 1996-97 Apple sold a digital camera, the QuickCam (and then, IIRC, the QuickCam 500). Steve killed the line when he came back, and (as someone who had access to one at work) all I can say is "good riddance".
The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a fixed-focus device with secondary viewfinder glass, no on-board LCD display, and it weighed about 0.5Kg (one of your old-school pounds). It was mostly marketed at estate agents and other professions who needed to snap shots and upload them to a computer frequently; as a consumer device it was a bit crap -- twice the cost of a cheap photo-film SLR and vastly inferior quality.
What made digital cameras practical was cheap expandability (remember when a 16Mb CF card was expensive and bleeding edge?) and digital viewfinder backs. Which didn't really arrive at a consumer-friendly price point until 1999-2000 (I remember paying £700 for a 1.4 megapixel camera with a digital viewfinder circa 1999-ish).
Which in turn tells us why iPhoto didn't come along until the turn of the millennium ...
Apple Quicktake, Logitech QuickCam. I've owned the later and have used both. In retrospect I consider it the early version of instagram. My friends and I would take pictures of ourselves goofing around and upload them to our university webpages or Geocities. All in the same day. The other option was film cameras which could take days or weeks (or years if you lost a canister).
Surely not 3.5" floppies in 1998. 1998 was the year of 100MB zip disks, LS120 supper floppies. This was when everyone already had CD-roms in their PCs and some luck people had CD-writers.
I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.
> Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997), the first digital camera of the Mavica series.
> The later Digital Mavicas recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market.
[...]
> and a new CD Mavica series — which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.
I still remember the "writing to floppy" animation on the thing. It was a seriously cool bit of kit to use, chuck it in your bag with a box of floppies and you were good to go.
You must've been somewhere nice that had fast internet. I think most people back then had dialup, and downloading a single song would take at least 20 minutes on their 28.8k modem.
You just waited that long to download music. That was all there was to it. MP3 was mindblowing when it was first released, in terms of how good it sounded for the size.
Obviously many people just ripped their own CDs. Many CD-ROMs didn't support ripping CDs at a data level - so you had to rip in real-time via analog! Crazy.
Most people I knew had 56k modems by 98 (by '99 I had a cable modem), 128kbs compression was the standard you'd find, and getting a song for free by just waiting 15 minutes was still magic
Edit almost forgot about Ethernet in the dorms. I picked my college because of high speed Internet.
As mech4bg said, much or most of people's .mp3 libraries at that point had probably come straight off CD. Napster wasn't even released until 1999, and "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's edgy new slogan of 2001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo .
Wow, that's quite a find. A rare artifact from the pre-iPod, pre-iTunes Store tip of Apple's foray into digital media, and a strong piece from Apple's agency at the time.
You just queue up a bunch of stuff using a download manager[1] and stay connected for longer. Come back the next day (or two or three) and voila! The good managers would even resume partial downloads if the connection dropped (which it always did).
Audiogalaxy was our savior. Search from any computer and queue up the download to your satellite. When you arrived home 5-6 hours later your music would be waiting for you.
Yes, even if you exclude MP3s of commercially-recorded music as not really personal, it would be very hard to defend the proposition 'iMovie gave birth to the idea of "personal digital media"' or even 'iMovie first made "personal digital media" a reality'. Apple (and MS) had been trying to make consumer video editing a reality since at least 1991 and the launch of QuickTime (an awkward date if you want to centre everything around Jobs and/or NeXT). iMovie and the FireWire iMacs probably were an important step forward in making digital video editing into a mainstream and well-oiled consumer activity though.
Quicktime circa 1991 was not really "personal digital media"-grade technology. It was pixelated, postage-stamp sized videos even on a 640 x 480 screen. It wasn't until 1998 and the Sorenson codec that Quicktime began to approach what we would recognize today as usable video.
WinAmp came out before this too. Pretty sure it had lots of users. I think in general this side of the story is a bit overblown .. at the time (1998/99) iMac and Mac in general was a small player globally.
That's why patents on this sort of thing are so dangerous. The steady march of the state of the art makes the impossible possible. When it first becomes possible, it seems novel, because no one has ever done it before. But it was the hard disk and the image sensor in the camera that was the invention, not "personal digital media".
A few of my schools had Apple QuickTake[1] cameras around 1995-6. Not quite 'personal' or 'affordable', and it was a line that Jobs cancelled when he returned to the company, but the pins were being set up.
Absolutely! I remember the date because I was living in London and I wondered how to get a digital camera, which was still quite expensive and of course also crappy. It was also the time of GeoCities.
Once I had my first digital camera I immediately amassed thousands of photos, and I didn't have a Mac.
- How did he hire? What traits was he looking for? How did he evaluate technical ability? He seemed able to hire technical people able to stretch through the conventionally accepted boundaries.
- How did he manage technical people? He seemed able to identify those boundaries that could be pushed through, and motivate people through them.
- How did he envision the plausible technical possibilities outside the conventional wisdom?
- How did he envision product possibilities enabled by the combination of those various possibilities?
I get the love of design and focus on user experience. It's the ability to find to that at the edge of technical possibility that seems unique to me.
"In 1991, I started work at NeXT, as Product Manager for Interpersonal Computing. It was the internet, before there was much of an internet. We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW was born."
The web existed in 1991, and Mosaic was launched in 1993. I first saw it in 1993, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. Have I misunderstood his '5 years later' statement?
1996 wasn't when the Web was born, but it is a lot closer to the point in time when the Web and the Internet went mainstream. IIRC 1994 is often given as that year, and even by 1995 it (famously http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book... ) wasn't obvious to everyone that they were now at the centre of computing.
Yeah. 1994 is when I started seeing Zen and the Art of the Internet on the endcaps at Crown Books. Late 1995-1996 is when I started seeing books about the web given the same prominence.
I was going with the first two being inherent since it was invented, but we can say that NetSol being given admin over .com in 1993 was the second 'w'. In 1995 NetSol was given permission to sell them to anybody.
I'd say it's a slight mis-statement. It's more accurate if you replace the last three words with "web became more common."
BTW, the web was a big deal in a very small circle. In the Fall of 1994, I took a college ENG 100 course that explained how to email and browse the web. It was still very early days.
Everyone knows but it's nice to be reminded sometimes that Apple's level of polish is not the work of gods, and that it can be attained by hard work. The media likes to portray Apple as a magical force and deify's Jobs as the grand Wizard, it nice to see he's just a guy behind the curtains.
Was expecting something about how tyrannical and ruthless an operator he was. Pleasantly surprised by this article (not at his devotion to product), but by the fact that he took his CEO hat off and participated in product as a team member whose ideas could be thrown away like everyone else's.
Yes, but as the OP describes, the process involved much iteration and constant feedback and energy from Jobs, not just a memo of what he wanted to see on launch day
I think the point was that Jobs was working with the teams as a contributor more than a dictator. It very specifically pointed out that Jobs' ideas were decoupled from his role as CEO (as were everyone else's) so there were just lots of ideas, and the best ones stayed around while the rest were thrown out.
Perhaps Jobs started that process, but I'm sure it still exists with him gone.
When you look at some of the iApps - like iPhoto - i dont think he's irreplaceable. iPhoto sucks and always has. In software design, his influence was definitely hit and miss.
Segall’s description of Jobs includes an important additional component: obsession with keeping things simple (hence the book title). Segall provides numerous anecdotes of Jobs beating an idea with the “Simple Stick,” as he calls it, and compares it favorably against his relatively frustrating experiences working with other companies like Intel and Dell.
> The idea of "personal digital media" was born. This was Steve's vision, and why he put together the iMac DV, with Firewire and iMovie. We called it the Digital Hub strategy internally, to encourage you to put lots of personal digital media on your home computer.
"It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike in that way, and in that process"
It's interesting that everyone seems to come away with this opinion, I wonder what it says about Steve's personality. I remember from reading his biography that many of the people he ultimately had failings out with claimed the exact same thing.
Ooh, that's a wonderful observation. I've known a number of people that I would call 'Jobsian', based on my limited knowledge of him, of course. And in all cases they were really good at making me feel just that way.
i actually like it, it's basically the same that everyone else did that made a successful product. iterate.
there's nothing magical about it. if that's what you look for, you will be disappointed. he wasn't some kind of genius. he just tried out what worked and iterated.
it's the same reason why macbooks looked so smooth, while stupid acer was still putting fan ins on the bottom of the laptop until intel gave them ultrabook designs. really? who would do that. clearly none at acer has ever used an acer laptop for actual portable usage.
typed from my acer ultraportable with fan in at the bottom
The news is that there wasn't some "reality distortion field" cliche or temper tantrum. It's an account of Steve Jobs that you rarely read: sitting down with a team and iteratively designing products.
Indeed. No reality distortion fields or elevator firings or questions about virginity. Then again, I suppose all those really crazy things happened during his fist stint at Apple when he was young and restless.
Change the title OR the text.
This was an interesting article about the cool things he did.
Steve Jobs was involved in this work but this is NOT what this article is about.
So Jobs loved to micromanage. And it worked at Apple and at NeXT and at Apple, because Jobs knew a thing or two about software. But micromanaging your own cancer care doesn't work so well, does it now?
Judging from the Isaacson biography, Jobs would have been fine had he actually attended to the fact that he had cancer right away, rather than spending a year ignoring it.
It did make it into the book--Jobs mostly spent that year eating differently, but it wasn't a major focus of his life and aside from the change in diet he did more or less ignore it. If he obsessed over it as much as he actually obsessed over things at times, perhaps things would have gone differently. But it's clear that he did not.
It appears the book glossed over what actually happened. Jobs worked with a number of alternative medicine con artists, to no result, obviously. Obsessing doesn't work when the methodology is wrong, and alternative medicine is the wrong methodology for treating serious medical problems.
Maybe I'm just glossing over it. The sense I got from the book was that he did a lot of stuff with diet and alternative medicine, but he also refused to focus on the problem until it was too late. One would hope that if he were that focused on it, he would have changed his mind about treatment in time to actually do something about it, rather than letting it sneak up on him for a year.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html
Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently:
>Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field".
>Every. Single. Time.
>Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together.
It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.