
Icon Ambulance - sgk284
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKxXTw
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nhashem
Because it's Steve Jobs, this is a great anecdote. I'm sure we'll hear dozens
of them in the next couple days and weeks, all examples of Jobs' attention to
detail and design resulting in superior products and software.

Yet imagine your boss calling you on a Sunday and saying, "So I was reviewing
the DBA's data model for the new product, and I really don't like how he's
called the columns with customers identifiers 'cust_id' instead of
'customer_id.' We use 'customer_id' in all our other tables. It's just wrong
and and I'm going to have him fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?" And
then you get an e-mail called 'Customer Column Naming Convention Ambulance'
five minutes later.

I mean... if you got a call like this from anyone else, wouldn't it be
absolutely absurd? How did Jobs manage to put his own mark on design decisions
like this without totally micro-managing or hit-and-run-managing everything?

~~~
cmelbye
I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than
attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.

~~~
tlrobinson
Steve Jobs doesn't think so. Have you _seen_ the _insides_ of Apple products?
They're as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.

~~~
sachinag
This is another one of the ways in which Apple is very much like Nintendo.
(Others include very strong leadership; doing things their own way, standards
be damned; and cultivating the brand above all else.) The inside of the N64,
in particular, was astonishing.

~~~
uxp
I am a trained watch repair technician. In school, we were trained to never
touch the movement of a watch with our bare hands, even if it was filled with
water and any sort of dirt, and to never leave a movement sitting out in the
open air to collect dust, even if it was already filled with dirt.

The only reason why, it develops the habit of leaving fingerprints on parts
and leaving clean watches out in the open.

If you don't strive to be clean, efficient, and build beautiful products that
you enjoy looking at and working on, even when they are broken or where no
single person outside of you and your colleagues are going to see it, then you
will start making mistakes by leaving fingerprints and broken code snippets on
the side where your customers are going to notice.

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huhtenberg
> _I'm sorry I didn't answer your call earlier. I was in religious
> services..._

Is that what he literally said? "In religious services"? I find it _really_
hard to believe. It is more fitting of a blog post that has been adopted to
the format of "The Jobs Tales". Gender-neutral, religion-agnostic, PG-13.

~~~
mweimer
Since the author is Indian, he is most likely Hindu. If he said he was
attending Hindu temple worship service (or whatever they call it), some
readers may have not know what he was talking about. I think it was simpler to
phrase it that way.

~~~
abcd_f
He was _quoting_ the conversation, and there's only one way to "phrase" a
quotation.

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comice
I think most rational people would have said something like: "Steve, I agree
that is an important detail but it does not warrant a phone call to me on
Sunday morning. Send me an email. We'll speak tomorrow."

The question is, why didn't people say things like that to Steve Jobs?

Or do only the ones that prostrated themselves to him ever speak up? (or get
the attention when they do?)

I want some stories of people telling Jobs to piss off.

~~~
raldi
Well, it _was_ less than a week before the MacWorld keynote, where the logo
would be shown on a giant screen in front of a huge audience.

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ary
Sudden love for Gundotra's favorite authoritarian? Sounds more like a sigh of
relief.

Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2010: "if Google did not act we faced a Draconian
future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be
our only choice"

~~~
philwelch
I don't know how relevant this is, but you can respect your opponents, and
retirement is the best time to do so.

As a child, I was a religious fan of the Seattle Sonics. I knew virtually the
entire roster by name, face, and number. And I watched them in the playoffs
the year they made the finals against the Bulls. I hated Michael Jordan. Maybe
that's a strong word, but I wanted nothing more than to see him and the Bulls
beaten, especially by the Sonics. Despite some excellent play by Seattle, the
Bulls won again, and again the next year against Utah.

When Jordan retired, I respected him. I wanted to see him beaten in the late
prime of his championship winning career but he never let it happen. Not even
my Sonics could beat him, but losing to Jordan's Bulls meant almost as much as
beating a lesser team in the Finals. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's easy
to see many of Apple's competitors and rivals taking a moment to acknowledge
and respect the man.

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random42
Why did it sound like a eulogy to me? :(

~~~
rokhayakebe
Maybe because Vic said "My prayers are with you" in the end.

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A-K
That penultimate paragraph is certainly a change in tune from Vic's I/O
keynote last year... ;)

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johnx123-up
What was that?

~~~
A-K
[http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2010/5/22/googles-vic-
gundotr...](http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2010/5/22/googles-vic-gundotra-
labels-apples-steve-jobs-as-quotbig-bro.html)

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siglesias
Which icon is he referring to?

Update, via @arnoldkim: _Jan 2008, Jobs did MWSF Keynote and introduced
Webclips with home screen icons. twitpic.com/6aye3l_

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mariusmg
I would have been impressed if Jobs would have fix it himself...

~~~
georgechen
Jobs did task himself to make / fix icons with the original Macintosh launch.
Fairly well documented he had a hand in everything.

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giancarlofrison
where is the story?? someone that call on sunday for the icon deserve so much
admiration? I don't believe it...

~~~
WalterSear
I don't get it either. At first I thought this, and the other 'Steve Jobs'
stories in my reader were some kind of concerted joke.

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aneth
Assuming the anecdote is accurate, my guess is this was Steve's subtle way of
nudging Vic to be more attentive to details. I don't think Steve would call
anyone at anytime making a fuss over such a small thing - he would never get
any work done.

Call someone who's work is starting to slip once on a Sunday to complain about
some minutiae, and you are letting them know that you are watching - even if
you aren't really watching all the time. I think this is a leadership
technique, not the micro-management it appears to be.

This also is a way of Steve asserting control and dominance. Making someone
scurry over a mis-tinted letter sets the tenor of the relationship.

I think it's important not to take the wrong lessons from all these anecdotes.
Jobs knows how to get good work out of people by causing them to demand
perfection of themselves and to fear producing imperfect products. No CEO has
time to exact perfection end to end - their job is to set standards,
expectation, and culture. Sometimes ridiculous demonstrations of micro-
management are just what someone needs.

------
Kavan
I have just blogged about this article at FounderandFriends.com.

Here is the text from it.

Steve Jobs, is someone I admire hugely. Yes, he has numerous personality
floors but his obsession to follow his heart in all things in his life is
extremely admirable. Watching his Stanford Commencement speech too many times
in a job I didn’t enjoy led me to quit as a Derivatives Trader and sent me on
my current path, back to the startup world I left many years ago. He has
literally changed my life.

Steve’s obsession has led him to become a product perfectionist. And is why
Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world. Almost every
product that comes from Apple is spectacularly awesome. And Vic’s post
illustrates the depths of Steve’s obsession. I have heard similar stories
about Jack Dorsey at Square, tweaking spacing on receipts because he felt they
were not beautiful enough.

In Vic’s post the comments are full of ‘the devil is in the details’ quotes of
admiration for Jobs’ obsession. But the question for us is, ‘Should we as
startup entrepreneurs have the same obsession with the details of our
products?’.

My answer is that, unfortunately, we can’t. And I really mean it when I say
unfortunately. I am a perfectionist myself in a lot of ways. When I do
something I pour my heart and soul into it. I want it to be the best I can
make it. I become obsessed and it is constantly in my mind. I go to bed and
wakeup thinking about it. My girlfriend recently pointed out that 70% of our
conversation is about SayMama. All the SayMama animations, transitions and
buttons movements, design, logo and user flows have all been laboriously
thought through and refined. The amount of energy myself and the team have
spent on details has been immense.

The problem is that we misplaced our passion. We are currently pivoting the
business, or rather accelerating it to where we wanted it to be in a year or
so from now. This means that we will be putting most of our energy into a new
product. All the details we crafted in saymama.com don’t matter.

Obsession is not the problem, the problem is where we focus the obsession. For
us startups, the obsession should be placed in finding product/market fit and
gaining traction. And in finding our product champions who will help spread
the word. A higher level of abstraction of obsession. Not the details but the
broader product.

Obsession with the details of a logo are only gifted to those who have viable
product that serves a users need. Those like Steve and Jack who already have a
viable business. Personally I can’t wait for this day, but until then all my
energy will go into defining where SayMama and our subsequent product fit into
the world of real time video communications.

We are still guided by the same compass, ‘to take real world human interaction
and replicate it online’. But the obsession is not on the product details. It
is on creating something that solves users’ problems in a way that no one else
does.

~~~
ElliotH
I think people would generally appreciate you summarising your post and then
perhaps quietly noting you'd blogged on the subject in the bottom line. (Just
for future reference)

~~~
Kavan
Got it, thanks Elliot.

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joshu
This doesn't ring true to me.

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sgk284
Vic Gundotra is the Senior Vice President of Social at Google. This anecdote
is straight from his mouth.

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veidr
Steve Jobs is the exception that proves the rule, "Don't micromanage".

