Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point.
And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they, more than anything, demonstrate the height of Steve's capability of creating a company and product. Anybody who used Sun's Desktop OS and associated applications 5 years later saw how far ahead of the market NeXT was. I thought it was a far superior product to the Macintosh, which, by 1993/1994, was starting to get long in the tooth, and by 1996/1997 had fallen behind Windows in platform power/flexibility, causing me (never particularly religious about the platform I worked on - best tool for the job and all) to leave the Mac behind and switch to Windows (Followed by a switch back in 2003 when OS X took the lead again)
Does anyone honestly think Apple would exist today (and certainly not in it's current dominance) were it not for this single individual?
And, is it really a coincidence that Pixar rose to the heights it did with Steve at the helm?
Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. Designers/Architects are somewhat more rare, but they can be identified, recruited, and hired.
But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Certainly doesn't mean we have to like them as people though.
I don't totally disagree, but I think this is excessively sunny.
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.
I agree about the iPod, before that Apple was a sad story. They just rebranded the Diamond PMP for the Napster crowd, which was pretty smart. Nobody knew what an MP3 player was till Napster came along:
Diamond Rio MP3 player - 1998
Napster - 1999
iPod - 2001
After that, everything they made was a minimal white box with rounded corners and the rest is history. LOL.
If I recall correctly, Apple didn't really take off until they released a Windows compatible iPod. That singular decision to leap out of the Apple-only ecosystem is what set the stage for the iPhone and the iPad and all other success thereafter. I wonder what world we would be in if Apple had continued to insist on people switching to OSX hardware before enjoying the benefits of the iPod. I suspect that most of the huge market for Windows users would have turned to the Zune, which the few people who actually own them seemed to like. Image a world where the Zune had won the music player wars.
> But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
With respect that's as blinkered a view in the opposite direction. Neither the "Jobs was a genius" nor the "Jobs was an asshole" narratives are incorrect, but neither are complete and as such neither is particularly helpful or enlightening on it's own.
To me at least, what makes Jobs most interesting is what he achieved despite being an asshole and how that played out. He undoubtedly was a thoroughly unpleasant individual and people who worked with him will queue around the block to tell you that, but he also, coming from a pretty low baseline, turned Apple into the largest company in the world by getting many of those same people who will tell you he's an asshole to build genuinely great products.
The most interesting people are rarely one thing or the other - that's what makes them interesting.
I don't know what the big deal about Apple being the "largest company in the world" is. Who was the company that they passed. Exxon Mobile? Shell? They create great products used by billions around the world. No one romanticizes their CEOs, and they're all assholes too.
It's not who they passed on the way up, it's the fact that they did it in 12 years starting from when their company was 60 days from bankruptcy after spending the preceding decade in a seemingly endless death spiral with no future. Do you not remember Apple in 1996? Blackberry right now looks positively bursting with potential by comparison.
But going back to the original point, if that's true you could say that Apple was in a slightly better state than it might have appeared (in that it had leverage over MS that it could use that might not have been obvious at the time) but I don't think it significantly undermines the idea that Jobs did a fairly remarkable job in turning Apple around.
After all, MS and many other companies had far more resources than Apple even with the settlement and none of them had the same level of success Apple enjoyed during that period (or since).
Who says that visionaries can't be egomaniacs? And, in the case of Jobs, who says that he could have been an effective visionary without being an egomaniac?
I don't think I worship Steve Jobs, nor do I think he's a hero. But I don't think anybody can second guess what he accomplished in his many careers. If it had just been the Apple, we could have ascribed that to Woz. Or the Macintosh, we could have suggested Raskin was the key, Or Next was all about Avie Tevanian, or Pixar was all about Lassiter, Or iMacs all about Jonie Ives, or iPod all about Fadell, or Apple 2.0s resurgence all about Tim Cook, iOS was all about Forstall, or the iPhone/iPad...
But, there's a common thread to all of those creations - and yes, behind all of them were massive collaborations of incredibly talented people, lead by inordinately brilliant designers, engineers, and architects - but in the center, unreasonably demanding and pushing, was Jobs.
That's all I think we need to give him credit for, but no less.
I think most companies fail because of the 'culture of mediocrity', especially when they grow. A leader who is unconditionally asshole with a good taste is exactly what keeps the culture fresh and inspired. That's who Jobs was.
> Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another.
The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
There is always room for differentiation at the top, either as an architect, or leader - but (speaking of my own profession) - I've never actually seen an environment where any particularly network engineer wasn't replaceable. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a first class network engineer is that they leave behind an environment that is well documented, designed to industry standards, and is pretty much resistant outages as a results of single points of failure.
A Network engineer who is a 'Hero' and can never go on vacation, is worth much less than a network engineer who has built an environment that any random Taos CCIE can come in and manage with a couple days cross training.
Ironically, from that perspective, the more fungible [1] a network engineer is, the more valuable they are.
You seem to be contradicting his point, but as far as I can tell you're proving it.
The fact that you see such a stark difference between a first-class network engineer and the work of lesser mortals is proof that they aren't fungible.
I'll also point out that you have, perhaps unintentionally, changed the topic from design to maintenance. We're talking about product creation. Some people like to pretend that all the design happens in the head of the person with "designer" on their business cards. But anybody who has spent time in a team making great products knows that everybody is involved in design. It can't be otherwise, because design happens at the intersection of desire and possibility, and the technologists know the possibility space more deeply than anybody else can.
That a well-designed network can be easily maintained is demonstrates the great design skills of that first-class network engineer. That there are long periods in a network's life when design skills aren't needed isn't proof that technologists are interchangeable; it's proof that they aren't.
I'm not sure why you don't apply that reasoning to managers. You do not need continuous guidance from the CEO.
A great CEO, after he has built a good team and a good strategy can just let the company sailing along for a decade. He is just as fungible as the network engineer. I mean, Jobs died and Apple didn't immediately go bankrupt, another CEO just stepped in, and either cruise along ( or picked up where Jobs left of, future will tell )
The big difference between the 2 is the immediate impact and that's more a cultural thing than anything.
If you look at it from an engineering point of view, you avoid at all cost to design anything with such a fragile, expensive and exposed element as is the CEO role in a business the size of Apple.
I left the field because it is a pretty inglorious role: nobody congratulates you when the network withstand the load under the worst circumstances, but everybody point you a finger for the minimal glitch - when it is not your fault you have to prove it.
I mostly agree, but just one nit: Pixar was mostly John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and many wonderful folks including many animators. While Jobs personally funded the company for a long time (10 years or so? That's really quite a vision), he wasn't really running it.
I've spent a few hours reading the history of Pixar (it's controversial as to what role Jobs had, particularly around the "founding" - which he really wasn't) - and while I've come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs had very little (if any) role in actually running Pixar, he appears to have had some "catalyzing" effect - Issacson never really dived into that aspect of Job's personality - it might be his negotiating skill (which was epic), or his reality distortion field (which I think even Jobs fell under the influence of) - but from the very start of Apple, he just believed in a series of realities, and did whatever he could to change things so they came true.
Now, he didn't always win (most memorably in his ejection from Apple by the board), and sometimes this egomania had catastrophic effects - from his personal life, and most likely to his own health, where he refused to accept other people's opinion of what the best course of action was. You can argue and shape some people minds, but ultimately you can't win an argument with nature.
It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
> It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.
[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester
Churchill's an interesting example to bring up in what has become a thread about hero worship. The man was revered during the war and in all the gosh-wasn't-it-a-romantic-age reminiscences since; so much so that they gloss over things like his having proposed the Battle of Gallipoli and being sacked from the cabinet for that; his being the first person to push using gas on the Kurds (beating Saddam to it by quite a few years); and him being the only wartime leader to be ousted by a landslide majority before the war ended (and thus getting himself chucked out of cabinet in both world wars -- I don't think anyone else managed to do that either).
It does rather support the idea that hero worship is a really bad waste of time at best, and downright dangerous at worst...
From what I've read Jobs wanted a completely different future for Pixar (something like 3D rendering software for the masses) than what Lasseter, Catmull, and others wanted. It was their pushing for the future they saw and desired that's the reason behind the success of Pixar as we know it today. Jobs was supposedly looking to sell off Pixar and viewed it as a failure until Disney showed up.
Putting Pixar's success on Jobs alone is a huge disservice to the true believers that actually built Pixar.
> And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
On the former, it's a fairly modern phenomenon for anyone to start multiple companies that succeed and grow to a large size (unless you look at historical periods now recognised as having been infamously financially unstable, like the Dutch tulip boom years). Those who were equally if not more successful than Jobs just didn't bounce from company to company, but invested their efforts in one place.
As to the latter question, I think you'll find that there are quite a few people who could lay equal claim to (a) producing that many great products, and (b) having created the products Jobs is credited with.
Personally, I think you're all overlooking something. The people who work in our industry are by and large professionals. And a professional does what the boss says because that's what the salary is for. It's not like we get the salary anyway and then do what the boss says if we feel like doing it or think he's inspiring enough!
So, to give an anecdotal example, when the iPad prototype comes to Jobs and he does that fish tank routine and says "aha- air bubbles, therefore you can still squash it down more", that's just being an arsehole to people who work for you. What, you think they had a dozen prototypes just so the boss could dunk one in water, destroying it? They're paid so that if he says "squash it more please", they go do it. That's what engineers do. The teenage drama queen nonsense isn't required.
And if you believe the arsehole-ness is a necessary thing to be a genius and get things done, you have been watching far too much House for your own good.
Honestly, the more you learn about Jobs, the less you see that you'd hold up to your kids as a role model; whereas the more you learn about Wozniak, the more you see that you'd hold up.
And we're still only talking about the technical work; nobody's commented yet on the moral issues surrounding the actual manufacture of products like the iPhone. Lovely device; but is that worth the human abuse it takes to manufacture it?
I did the exact same thing, because of similar views (using the best tool for the job). I also switched to Windows in 1995 or so, and switched back to Mac in 2004.
Hmm, I'd put Jobs lower and Musk higher; I'd suggest we're overscoring Steve Jobs still. Paypal is clearly already a big success though, and both Tesla and SpaceX have the potential to become so in the coming years.
For me, we're still under Jobs' reality distortion field. I mean, which companies did he build? NeXT which did interesting technology but basically died in the market. Pixar where there's significant dispute about his level of involvement and he may have been more an angel investor.
And Apple. Huge, sure. But he was kicked out the first time round for focusing exclusively on a product that was losing money hand over fist, was both more expensive and less capable than rival products, and which was never more than a minor niche player (albeit stably so), squandering the Apple II's early work. When he returned it was some years before they regained serious success, and that was largely with iOS. Which, by the time of his death, was already losing market position in both phones and tablets, a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did, for similar reasons - one manufacturer and a few devices simply can't innovate as fast as a whole army of rivals cooperating. He built great products, but a great company to live for a lifetime?
Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have even 0.1% of Steve Jobs' success. He was a visionary, a brilliant marketer and an excellent communicator. But I'd suggest his personal single-minded obsession interfered with his ability to hear the market reaction to his products, and the consequence of that was not companies that last a lifetime.
Paypal is interesting and a niche success, but wasn't deeply visionary. SpaceX and Tesla are cool, and may even end up being market successes - but they still have a ways to go before proving themselves.
I'm a Musk fan, but Jobs had a huge body of work in fantastic products/movies that his enterprises created under his leadership.
a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did
There's your problem right there. You're somehow equating number of clone devices out there to Jobs's visionary ability to create entirely new markets with products and services that were then copied endlessly.
Number of cheap clone devices out there produced by third party manufactures was never Jobs' goal. How is IBM doing with that whole computer clone business, by the way?
Paypal was much more than a niche success - "payments on the internet" is huge. You can argue Paypal didn't materialize its vision, but the vision was there.
That's because IBM-the-company has always been a multi-headed beast with a lot of other -- and far more successful -- businesses both before and after the IBM PC business existed. crusso is not talking about the company, but the business, which IBM got out of in 2004/2005 after years of losing money on it.
And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they, more than anything, demonstrate the height of Steve's capability of creating a company and product. Anybody who used Sun's Desktop OS and associated applications 5 years later saw how far ahead of the market NeXT was. I thought it was a far superior product to the Macintosh, which, by 1993/1994, was starting to get long in the tooth, and by 1996/1997 had fallen behind Windows in platform power/flexibility, causing me (never particularly religious about the platform I worked on - best tool for the job and all) to leave the Mac behind and switch to Windows (Followed by a switch back in 2003 when OS X took the lead again)
Does anyone honestly think Apple would exist today (and certainly not in it's current dominance) were it not for this single individual?
And, is it really a coincidence that Pixar rose to the heights it did with Steve at the helm?
Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. Designers/Architects are somewhat more rare, but they can be identified, recruited, and hired.
But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Certainly doesn't mean we have to like them as people though.