

Steve Jobs in Four Easy Steps: What the electronics industry can learn - nradov
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/steve-jobs-in-four-easy-steps

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jolohaga
Reducing Apple's success to 'four easy steps' is simple-minded. Just a phrase
to get people to read this article.

If you think about any one of these 'steps', you realize it depends on
countless other aspects that the author doesn't have space (or imagination) to
write about.

I can understand what bothered Jobs about this writer.

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J3L2404
From the comments:

'Apple's eschewing of openness is a myth. What they have done is use free and
open standards where they cannot add value (e.g., in an OS kernel, a network
stack) and go closed where they do add value. MS is much more closed: they
insist on keeping the innards of the OS closed, and also make it very hard to
inter-operate by breaking accepted standards. Jobs's real genius was a first-
class skill at abstracting: trimming things down to their essentials. Even if
we don't agree with all his choices, we can learn a lot just from
understanding that.'

~~~
nirvana
I'm tired of hearing how Apple is "closed".

Before Apple there was no expansion plane on computers. The Apple II was the
first, and the IBM PC copied it. Before Apple there was no open app
marketplace, to get your apps on the a cell phone you had to be a big company
and do a deal with the carriers. From beginning to end, Apple has been working
to open the technology world and empower people.

Also, part of empowering people is delivering a quality, safe, reliable user
experience. That means things like, not shipping malware in their appstore.

Look at Apple, and Steve Jobs personally's, stance on DRM. DRM was a
competitive advantage for Apple, because iTunes was the worlds largest digital
seller of music, and all the music sold on the iTunes store came with DRM, and
could only be played on iPods.

Did Jobs and Apple exploit this, or did they try to push the music industry to
remove DRM? The answer is obviously the latter... and now music sold on the
iTunes music store (a store created to support the iPod and run at break-even
for that purpose) can be played anywhere.

When they had the power to do so, not only did they not stay proprietary, they
lobbied very hard to open up the rest of the music industry.

The only place Apple keeps things private is with its inventions, and that's
understandable in a world where every graphical interface, and a large chunk
of the phones sold are direct ripoffs of Apple's inventions.

~~~
dimitar
Well Apple is a business and has done what business are supposed to - make
money. Is there really an ideology other than that?

DRM is a good idea only for content industry. Why risk losing the profits from
$200 devices for a scheme having no proven effect on increasing profits of 30%
per $1 song?

Open-source software is reliable and is much cheaper than to develop your own
from scratch. You cannot beat free.

