

What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997? - hn
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/26/steve-jobs-apple-1997/

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10ren
So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain
why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself.

I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of
counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming
anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in
development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).

Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm
people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make
them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of
Graham Chapman:

 _[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather,
the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an
intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of
Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing
sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into
the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead
Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially
trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we
make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead
Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than
a toaster._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python>

~~~
swombat
_Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm
people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make
them much better_

Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical
or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable,
complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of
surrounding yourself with great people and getting them all working together
is underrated.

Even if Steve Jobs contributed nothing to the ideas that were developed (which
is unlikely, based on what I've heard), he still deserves the praise for being
the human gravitational well that pulled all those people to work together and
create awesome products.

~~~
kjhgftgyui
And do it consistently - a lot of CEOs talk about this stuff. But then when it
comes near the end of the financial quarter or a big customer asks for
something, or there is a rumor of a competitor the plan all changes.

------
notaddicted
Apple is a data point in one of the eternal HN debates: Ideas vs. Execution.

The functional design of the iPhone was a surprise to no one, everyone wanted
it, Apple delivered.

There are many operating system, but OSX is still an asset to Apple.

It may be the case that Apple has great ideas, but they _certainly_ have great
execution.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Apple not only has great technical execution, they have great design
execution. There are many industries with lots of excellent companies capable
of this combination (automobiles, musical instruments, film, firearms,
fashion) but in software this combination is rare as hen's teeth. Thus Apple's
dominance in certain markets and customer devotion.

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Tichy
I must admit that this article rather made me realize that most of what Apple
did is just to create some fancy looking PCs. The iPhone was revolutionary
indeed, but overall the achievements seem overblown.

I still think that Steve Jobs is cool, though.

~~~
tfh
_> just to create some fancy looking PCs_

that's not true..

~~~
pan69
They are fancy looking PC's. What'd you mean "that's not true"?

~~~
tfh
i meant it's not _just_ making fancy looking PCs that got apple into what it's
become today.

------
dnsworks
Maybe we should be asking, "What if Jobs didn't beg Bill on huge screen
television for $100m".

~~~
yardie
To a company that still had $4 billion in cash reserves it's the equivalent of
one wallstreet banker asking another for hotdog money

------
sleepingbot
NeXT could have ended in the perfect Linux distro, open sourced, leading the
Linux kernel development, making the distros environment even richer (Mac
Linux for mac users, Ubuntu-Debian & similars for those who don't buy Apple
hardware, Chrome OS for netbookers; and minoritary distros for the ones who
tweak their own flavor.)

The world would be a better place.

The hardware? Some has been good. Some really advanced to their time. Some
G4Cube-ish.

I have to admit the guy is brilliant.

~~~
wtallis
NeXTSTEP wasn't based off the Linux kernel, and I think even if it had been
GPL'd, it probably wouldn't have ended up that the Linux port was the
preferred way to run it. Consider that OPENSTEP/Mach was contemporaneous with
Red Hat Linux 4 and kernel 2.0. Everybody in the market for a desktop Linux
distribution at the time would have jumped ship. If anything, the Mach 2.5
microkernel would have been stripped out in favor of a pure FreeBSD system,
which would probably have resulted in Linux having the same also-ran status
that the BSDs have now.

