
Steve Jobs's Real Genius - iamclovin
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
======
chubot
It has some truth to it, but ignores a lot of salient facts in favor of a cute
argument (insert Gladwell dig here).

Steve Jobs' had many parts to his genius. Tweaking products until they were
really finished was one.

But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was
_holistic thinking_. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an
industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he
deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them
to create a hugely successful business and set of products.

Another part of his genius was to pick the best talent and get the most out of
them.

This is all obvious, but after reading Isaacson's book, which was quite good,
this article is basically fluff. Gladwell basically just adds this marginally
related story about tweakers so the entire article isn't regurgitating all the
interesting anecdotes from the bio.

EDIT: Also, the use of the word "tweaker" is a stupid rhetorical trick -- the
article is basically a troll.

"In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He
was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had
claimed as a young man."

Really? Does anyone honestly believe a person that was CEO of 2 different
companies that changed industries has a narrow vision? This is willfully
ignoring reality to make a cute little article.

~~~
irrationalfab
"But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was
holistic thinking. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial
designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply
understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to
create a hugely successful business and set of products."

I still have no clue about how he managed to do it. For example, I think that
Cocoa and Next technologies are very elegant and are at the foundation of
Apple current success. Yet how can you lead the developments of those
technologies if you don't understand them. Why it didn't go the same way, of
let say, Symbian.

I'm not an expert in CS (not even close), but to me it looks like there is
very little crust on Apple technologies. And I don't think that this is the
case for all the other mayor tech companies, where I observe a significative
amount of technical debt. One explanation might be that there was great
technical people on board and in charge. But this is the norm for all
multinationals. How he managed to design so few products that are "bad apples"
(pun intended).

This is a really core issue for me. I'm a business guy by education (two
Masters of Management) who always has been oriented to software development (I
always liked it and the basis of C always have been intuitive). When the App
Store launched I started to work with a CS Engineer to develop an app. While
the arrangement was workable, I felt I was missing so much without the proper
technical knowledge. How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field.
Consequently, having the chance, I took the next two years of my life learning
sw development, graphic/UI, design, and a bit of web development. Financially
and mentally it was a very costly decision that kept me on the verge of
burning out and, yet, I don't understand if it was the right choice.

I would love to hear the opinion of the community.

~~~
matwood
_I'm not an expert in CS (not even close), but to me it looks like there is
very little crust on Apple technologies._

There is some, but not nearly as much as say what's in win32. This lack of
'crust' can be attributed to SJ's personality. He had no problems dropping
something he didn't think worked. This led to headaches for 3rd parties, and
is one of the primary reasons enterprise stayed away from Apple (along with no
roadmaps).

 _How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field._

It's not so much that you need to understand every in and out of the field.
What you need to understand is effort level required develop something[1], and
when you're clearly getting BSed. How much technical knowledge you need to do
those two things is the hard part to figure out.

[1] I once had a manager ask me why a change was going to take so long because
she thought "it's just and if/then statement."

~~~
irrationalfab
" _It's not so much that you need to understand every in and out of the field.
What you need to understand is effort level required develop something[1], and
when you're clearly getting BSed._ "

Those are not trivial things to do. Is not so rare for me to underestimate the
effort required for a change in own code (but this might be because I'm not
such a great programmer).

------
shawndumas
I have to give Bill Gates the credit for nailing the real genius of Steven
Jobs...

.

Lise Buyer (to Bill Gates and Steven Jobs): "Question, I guess it’s historical
curiosity. You approached the same opportunity so very differently. What did
you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of
sooner or thought of first by watching the other guy?"

.

Bill Gates: "Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. [laughter] He has
natural–it’s not a joke at all. I think in terms of intuitive taste, both for
people and products. You know, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were
questions about software choices, how things would be done that I viewed as an
engineering question; that’s just how my mind works. And I’d see Steve make
the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me
to explain. The way he does things is just different, I think it’s magical.
And in that case, wow."

.

\-- <http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/>

------
glenra
I keep thinking of this quote by George Bernard Shaw:

 _"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."_

Steve Jobs was the consummate unreasonable man.

------
jroseattle
I'm ready for the Jobs dissertations to be finished. I've made up my mind --
he was professionally successful but a personal failure.

It's my interpretation, so I'm not trying to change anyone else's opinion. But
to me, if you have to scream at subordinates and mock colleagues and generally
treat everyone else as inferior, you have failed -- in spite of one's
accomplishments.

Some call that perfection or simply dealing with the attributes of genius. I
call it a cop-out to let petulence and immaturity be an acceptable excuse for
success.

An open request of all existing geniuses: try impressing us with
accomplishments that don't require you to stomp on the dignity of others.

~~~
vacri
It reminds me of my opinion on folks like Russell Crowe. Incredibly talented
at what they do, but destroy people to further their product. Crowe uses and
abuses people. He also has a reality distortion field, but woe betide you if
you're in his way. Friends of mine say "but it's okay because he's such an
artist!" to which I say bullshit, you can provide his product without being a
mongrel. And people do.

------
saturdaysaint
The more I read, the more I think that any attempt to seperate Jobs'
"shortcomings" from his "genius" are wrong from the start. I look at
Gladwell's anecdotes and I see that Jobs' greatest talent was making
relatively modest (often borrowed) visions into well-executed reality via his
unique combination of aesthetic sensitivity and barely controlled personality
power (which, as Isaacson gets at, also seems a function of his deep
sensitivity).

Gladwell's theory falls apart if you really consider the competitors. If you
look at the history of Microsoft's tablets and the Xerox Star, their biggest
barrier wasn't a lack of "tweaking", it was the ability to get the products
out of labs without getting killed or tweaked into mediocrity by a hundred
conniving VPs.

Here I think we need to acknowledge that Jobs' personality was part of his
genius. Perhaps typical 20th century corporate culture/governance has been so
inherently larded with politics, so easily driven into misaligned incentives,
that it's been almost inimical to creating excellent products of high
technical sophistication ( _especially_ involving both hardware and software).
Perhaps recognizing and rapidly correcting these inherent sicknesses (from
removing "B players" to forcing dramatic but necessary strategy shifts)and
actually shipping great products requires a certain craziness, a _rudeness_.

------
ghshephard
Insightful and highly accurate characterization of Issacson's Biography. I
often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves
(and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability, that narcissism,
is essential to their ability to ensure their vision comes out with the purity
that we saw in the iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air, etc...

I also appreciate this characterization's of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed
lack of imagination:

"Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at
its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was
narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he
had claimed as a young man."

~~~
rimantas

      > of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination
    

Where can I read this rant? Or do you have in mind Jobs' rant about
__Microsoft__ having no taste which is completely different thing.

~~~
latch
No, he means _Gates_

google: Jobs on Gate no imagination

"Bill basically has no imagination and never find anything, that’s why I think
he’s more comfortable this time on philanthropy rather than technological.
He’s just shamelessly take others’ ideas,"

There's also another much older quote, which I think is an awesome one for
Bill Gates:

"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I
trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye,
before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's
more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his
house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

~~~
glenra
> _"I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I
> broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already
> stolen it."_

The main problem with that analogy is that Jobs _bought_ that TV set from
Xerox. Xerox freely let Apple see what they were working on with the
understanding that Apple would use some of these ideas. In exchange for this,
Xerox got to _profit_ from the resulting increase in the stock price - they
got a bunch of early Apple stock. The bulk of this transaction was aboveboard
and mutually beneficial.

Microsoft didn't _pay_ for Apple's info; they got access to it under a pretext
and did _not_ in return put Apple in a position to profit from what was used.

~~~
PakG1
The white man bought all the land from the natives too, when they first
arrived in North America. For peanuts. The natives had no concept of what they
were doing because they didn't understand the importance of what they were
giving away (and economic transactions of the sort were a newfangled thing for
them). High school history classes. As my teacher said, "And you might think
that these guys got ripped off. Well, they did."

A legal transaction can still be considered stealing, and I think it's very
easy to say that Xerox didn't realize what they were giving away. Now the
thing is, when transacting with an entity like Xerox, it probably can't be
considered criminal. :)

~~~
glenra
Xerox wasn't using any of that stuff to its potential; the million bucks they
made off it by way of their Apple investment was the best they were going to
get. And unlike the Indians they didn't even have to get "kicked off the land"
to get it! When Xerox shared their ideas, they still _had_ those ideas and
could continue to use them much as before.

No, if you want to redeem the claim that Apple "stole" from Xerox you can't
really do it based on the ideas that came out of those meetings.

The one thing Apple did that _was_ vaguely disreputable is: they then _hired
away_ many of the key Xerox people. You can't say they "stole" the ideas but
they did "steal" the employees. Not in the sense that it was illegal -
employees have free will and freedom of contract and there was no non-compete
clause - but that this went beyond what Xerox reasonably expected to come out
of the transaction, so you can see how Xerox might have been miffed.

------
grayrest
I'm annoyed that Gladwell classifies Jobs as a tweaker. He's not. He's a
tastemaker. From TFA:

> When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back,
> __“You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” __

Can you imagine one of the British hacker/tweakers in the article (or a
hacker/tweaker you know) EVER saying something like that? The respect I have
for role comes from them having both the vision AND the skill to take
something someone else invented and make it fly. Jobs sees a thing, decides
"that sucks" and has the people he hired bring him iterations with varying
degrees of feedback until he's happy. That stretches the definition of
tweaking so far it basically makes the word meaningless, lacking both the
engineering and the raw ideas. Jobs is probably the best tastemaker of all
time, a great presenter, and a great CEO, but comparing him to the great
hackers of the Industrial Revolution is offensive to me.

------
spodek
Gladwell creates a dichotomy of the tweaker and inventor. I believe this
dichotomy is false[1] and think he concludes Jobs a tweaker because all
inventors are tweakers.

Gladwell's tweakers are "skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors:
resourceful and creative men [people?] who took the signature inventions of
the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them
work". Inventors, by contrast, are large-scale visionaries.

Who, among people who created things, exemplifies a large-scale visionary?

[1] A conclusion largely based on Weisberg's excellent "Creativity: Beyond the
Myth of Genius" and Goldenberg's "Systematic Creativity in Business" as
profiled here -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity>

------
bluekeybox
Who is this Gladwell guy and what did he invent or made that is worth noting?

Or did he simply take someone else's opinions using someone else's language
and tweaked them a little bit to make them appear as his own?

~~~
crazygringo
Not sure if you're being serious or not...

But this is probably the worst Gladwell article I've ever read. I just
finished the Jobs biography, and Gladwell is just repeating parts of it. I
know Gladwell has a set number of words he has to deliver to the New Yorker
each year, but I'm actually kind of surprised the New Yorker accepted this
article. It's practically just plagiarism.

~~~
bluekeybox
I just finished reading the biography as well, and Gladwell's article gave me
the same impression it gave you. Repeat a bunch of things from Isaacson,
describe a false dichotomy between creators (the pious ones) and tweakers (the
fallen ones), then position Jobs as a "false prophet" on the basis of the
above false dichotomy. Next, set up yourself (Malcolm Gladwell) as being the
only one enlightened enough to tell true prophets from false ones (a claim
which would neatly place Gladwell's image next to the former ones). Oh and
pick an opportune moment to say all this to generate enough publicity around
yourself. Thinking goes: people have been talking too much about Jobs,; time
for them to talk a bit more about Gladwell.

Isaacson is, in places, brutal on Jobs, but he doesn't resort to cheap tricks
like this.

------
kevinalexbrown
I like the tweaker v innovator perspective. I agree that Jobs, and Apple in
general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players,
they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing
capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g.
they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't
invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to
use and nifty."

<cynicism on>

I agree that no company ever had innovated: when someone created mp3 players
there were already Walkmans, so mp3 are Walkmans without tape, and digital
instead of analog, before Walkmans there were other portable tape recorders
and players.

Before Nokia created cell phones there were already analog phones( I have one
that weights 2Kgs or 4 pounds), and before that there were "portable"
(backpack) radios.

<cynicism off>

Some people had pushed the envelope of what is possible, and some people
instead of recognizing that prefer to diminish what they had done so they
could feel better about their small accomplishments on life.

~~~
kevinalexbrown
My point wasn't to use the word "perfect" to "diminish what [Jobs] had done".
At the end of the day there's a reason I prefer Apple to Microsoft and it has
nothing to do with who innovated and everything to do with who perfected. I
don't like Apple products because they do something _new_ \-- if they do,
awesome, I just don't care. I like Apple products because they _work well_.

I just don't see how that was diminishing what Jobs did?

------
tmsh
I moderately disagree with Gladwell's conclusions, and fear he is trying to
'tweak' his own theories about 'tweakers' to fit Jobs.

Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he
was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection).

But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in
the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence
on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking.

It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design
perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so
different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal
behavior -- unless you have that vision.

~~~
joezydeco
Was Pixar really a "tweak"?

Remember that Jobs bought Pixar because he thought the _hardware_ that Pixar
designed and sold had potential.

It wasn't until Lasseter's work in doing shorts (to show off the software) and
commercials (to pay the bills) started taking off that the possibility of a
feature movie came about. That's more like a "pivot".

------
bh42222
"Tweakers" (God what a horrible name, and I thought "hacker" was kind of bad
for makers.) might have contributed to the industrial revolution in England.

Then again, the relative prices of labor vs energy at the time probably played
a greater role: <http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570>

It made sense to invest in labor saving machinery because you actually saved
money. In other places, labor was cheaper and energy more expensive, so it
just wasn't _economical_ to spend on industrial machinery.

------
OoTheNigerian
>When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back,
_“You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”_

I too am like this. I know what I want when I see it. I also know good stuff.
I am sure most people are the same way too.

The main difference between us and Jobs is; we do not have the patience to
wait until it it is right. The heart to tell 64 (!!!) nurses that they do not
fit. The authority to tell geniuses their work suck and they should come back
with more designs.

He was willing to be rude, difficult and a bully to get it right.

Are you?

~~~
Quarrelsome
Of all of the things to celebrate in Steve Jobs I'm not sure this is the best
one. If anything its the easiest to mis-construe. Can you imagine how many
people exist that are like Steve Jobs except without being able to "know good
stuff"? And how hellish those people are? _shudders_

Acting like this is super risky, if you don't get it right then everyone hates
you and you don't have results.

~~~
OoTheNigerian
Maybe my comment hinted I appove of diminishing people. I do not.

However, I wish I had the patience, clout, timing and resources to say no,
until I am satsfied with the outcome (Hopfully before the use expires).

I would love to do so being as humane as possible

------
bfrs
\----------------------------------------

Jobs, we learn, was a bully. _"He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly
what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you
cringe"_. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is
his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. _He cries
like a small child when he does not get his way._ He sits in a restaurant and
sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for
press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he
wanted calla lilies. _When his public-relations assistant returns, at
midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting"._
Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his
color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT,
in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot
assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as
they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched
from the viewing gallery. ... _when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-
nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and
gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does._ In the hospital at the
end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he
likes...

...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas.
Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells
Isaacson, _"He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say,
'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be
sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his
idea."_

\----------------------------------------

Was Jobs really such an _asshole_? If so, I think he was really lucky to have
Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about
Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is
also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems
to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would
have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks
in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.

------
niels_olson
Almost done with the book. Having read it, this strikes me as a 7th grade book
report. How does the same mag print Atul Gawande and this? And why does that
irritate me?

------
faramarz
Steve Jobs was a great director; perhaps the greatest of our generation.

That's the simplest I can say it. It wasn't about his singular abilities or
his design sense. He was the right director who had the decline and ownership
to do the great things he did.

I only read this piece because it was a Gladwell, but frankly i'm getting
tired of every other person and their mom trying to define Steve Jobs.

------
apitaru
I found a simple method that works really well: ask the student to invent
their own language syntax on paper. We start with a simple language that can
draw on screen, and proceed from there. I'm noticing that Students naturally
discover many of the issues and tricks that they would otherwise have to
"study" (such as flow of execution, nesting, variables)

I occasionally teach at schools in NY, and this semester my students
"invented" the smalltalk syntax. It was heartwarming to witness.

~~~
SickAnimations
Wrong thread?

~~~
apitaru
Oh I'm sorry! It was intended for this thread -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204525>

------
shashashasha
_Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I
see it,” he said._

This caption strikes me because my friend/professor in architecture just read
_Steve Jobs_ and said "Steve Jobs was an architect more than anything". We
often collapse these things onto a domain more familiar to us, and the model
of editor as Master Tweaker (and architect as Master Builder) seems to fit
Gladwell's world of thinking.

~~~
jonhendry
Or a director, ala Kubrick. The director doesn't hand-design everything in the
film, but he guides the designers and selects what works.

------
code_duck
This reminds me a lot of my business partner, who will not rest until our
projects are perfect. She's driven me nuts the entire time I've worked with
her, but this has brought our output to a much higher level than I would have
achieved without such an influence.

You have to love and hate someone who has such obsessive attention to detail.
The key to making this mindset positive is knowing when it matters and when it
doesn't.

------
ethank
It always struck me that Jobs would have made a really, really good A&R
executive and label president.

------
sharmajai
Was it, that he made things closed because he didn't want the user to screw
them up or was it because he thought they were already perfect and couldn't be
made better?

I would like to believe the former.

------
capkutay
There are no words that can sum up Steve Jobs genius and his contributions to
modern society.

On the other hand, I can't help but notice how much press/literature there has
been on his genius and I think it's starting to be excessive. Maybe it's just
me, but I'm not a fan of literature that praises success and goes in-depth
into the lives/processes of talented people(that's why I'm not a fan of
Gladwell's Outliers book). Where can you draw the line between admiring
someone's achievements and idolising their every trait?

~~~
tintin
_"his contributions to modern society"_ I'm reading this a lot, but I have a
hard time figuring what Jobs contributed to society. There are a lot of cars
and there are 'perfected' cars like Ferrari. But does that mean the creators
of Ferrari contributed to society?

~~~
learc83
Imagine if every car manufacturer copied the design of the "perfected" Ferrari
until almost every car sold was inspired by that Ferrari.

Then I would say that the designer of that car had contributed to society.

People forget what phones looked like in 2006. My parents now both have smart
phones that look a lot like iPhones (but aren't) that they spend hours using a
day. Like him or not, you can't argue Steve Jobs didn't have a huge impact on
modern society.

~~~
Toady
Steve Jobs wasn't the designer of the iPhone. Other people made it while he
cracked the whip. For some reason, a lot of the press is giving him credit for
everything at Apple in spite of his infamous reputation for taking credit for
other people's work.

Jef Raskin said these things in regards to the Macintosh project:

"What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and
graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea,
that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to
shoot the project down."

"After he took over, Jobs came up with the story about the Mac project being a
'pirate operation.' We weren't trying to keep the project away from Apple, as
he later said; we had very good ties with the rest of Apple. We were trying to
keep the project away from Jobs' meddling. For the first two years, Jobs
wanted to kill the project because he didn't understand what it was really all
about."

"I was very much amused by the recent Newsweek article where he [Jobs] said,
'I have a few good designs in me still.' He never had any designs. He has not
designed a single product. Woz designed the Apple II. Ken Rothmuller and
others designed Lisa. My team and I designed the Macintosh. Wendell Sanders
designed the Apple III. What did Jobs design? Nothing."

~~~
ghshephard
Chapter 10 of Issacson's book spends quite a bit of time talking about Raskin
vs Jobs on the Macintosh. Raskin is sourced several times for that chapter.
The Macintosh would have been a very, very different product if Jobs had not
taken over, and demanded a very different system than the one Raskin had
envisioned.

The Issacson Analysis (backed up by Atkinson) was that Raskin had envisioned
an underpowered, less expensive system that would not have had many of the
features that made the original Macintosh "Insanely Great."

I like Gladwell's analysis - Jobs was a great _editor_ He didn't necessarily
create very much, but he was driven to relentlessly critique until something
great emerged.

It's amazing how valuable a function that can be, particularly in the
presences of great engineers who can rise to the challenge.

The reason people praise Steve Jobs is not because he designed anything
(though he may have had a few design suggestions) - but because his singular
drive to release great products resulted in so many being created (and then,
quite logically, being copied by everyone else)

The Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad all came about because of Steve Jobs, and
have changed the technology that we use every day. Love him, or Hate him, you
can't take that away from him.

~~~
mayanksinghal
>The Issacson Analysis (backed up by Atkinson) was that Raskin had envisioned
an underpowered, less expensive system that would not have had many of the
features that made the original Macintosh "Insanely Great."

Or may be if Raskin was able to had it his way, we would Apple would have
brought a PC to nearly every home and has as much impact to the society as MS
had. We can only guess (and not even guesstimate) what would have happened if
Jobs weren't there in this particular project.

> _It's amazing how valuable a function that can be, particularly in the
> presences of great engineers who can rise to the challenge_ \- Yes exactly.
> One of the major issues is that the Engineers are been given very less
> credit. Jobs was the editor, the face of APPL and not the creator. The
> current trend is to attribute all the success of Apple to just Jobs and no
> one else. I am not aware if they were actually great designers, developers
> and engineers under him or was it him alone who single handedly guided dumb
> sheep into greatness. Most of the Job praises after his death tend to point
> towards the latter, which is unfair if not wrong.

~~~
acqq
> Or may be if Raskin was able to had it his way, we would Apple would have
> brought a PC to nearly every home and has as much impact to the society as
> MS had.

If I'm not wrong, Raskin's I'd say "anti-vision" consisted of no GUI, no
mouse, basically a kind of machine that even predated PC-s (capable of even
less, but therefore being simpler to use). Jobs wanted more than anywhere
existed and still having it simple to use.

I think it's easy to compare.

------
smutticus
I guess Steve Jobs' real genius is that people here are still talking about
him so long after he's dead.

A bunch of self proscribed hackers find him more interesting than either John
McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie. When in fact he was just more successful
monetarily. And better at getting you lot to talk about him.

~~~
rayiner
Apples and oranges. There is something refreshing about someone who is willing
to throw away a fundamental precept of tablet PCs (they have a stylus) because
it sucks. I think every engineering team needs someone with some level of
"wait why are we doing things this way?" (see P.G.'s essay on onions).

In a way Ritchie was the exact opposite. A lot of the answers to questions of
the form "why does C do things this way?" are "because BCPL did them that
way." Which is a perfectly good attitude for an engineer as well ("don't fix
what isn't broken") but also a more typical one.

------
ppk
Why is it dated November 14, 2011?

~~~
spacemanaki
The print edition will probably be in mailboxes Tuesday or Wednesday depending
on where you live, and is probably already on news stands. But it's common
practice with print magazines.

I feel like this question is asked every time something from the New Yorker is
posted to HN, and I feel old every time, even though I'm in my twenties.

------
niklas_a
Dated November 14..are we seeing the future?

------
truth_hurts
I never met Jobs and I know nothing about him personally. But if the stuff in
this article is true, he was an obnoxious prick, genius or not.

~~~
absconditus
I would love to work for such an obnoxious prick. I am tired of all of the
incompetents in the corporate world who just try to get along with each other
while accomplishing little or the startups producing yet another "social"
site.

~~~
qdog
You might want to look into how it was like to work for neXt. There were more
than a few layoffs during that phase of Jobs' life. Jobs had about a decade
where he pretty much seemed like a failing prick until Disney funded Toy Story
and start the second successful era of Jobs.

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Jobs' #1 asset was his Reality-
Distortion-Field, anyone standing too close to him would get caught in it, it
seems.

~~~
jonhendry
And yet there are people who followed him from Apple to NeXT and then came
back to Apple, like Bud Tribble and George Crow. And people who went along
from NeXT to Apple, or Pixar to NeXT to Apple. And people who were laid off
from NeXT when they stopped making hardware, like Jon Rubenstein, who joined
Apple in the Jobs era.

For being a prick, he seems to have managed to attract some long-term loyalty.

I think pricks are better-tolerated when they are trying to achieve something
their underlings think is worthwhile and unique.

