
Resigned - A-K
http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/resigned
======
ryandvm
I, apparently in agreement with Apple's investors today, have a little trouble
with the notion that Steve Jobs stepping down will have no effect on Apple's
success.

I'm afraid the Apple faithful are playing a little fast and loose with logic
on this one. Let me see if we have this straight...

1) Steve Jobs was absolutely and almost singularly responsible for Apple's
meteoric rise over the last 14 years. His vision, his taste, his standards,
his business acumen, all of it - has driven Apple past competitor after
competitor to become the most valuable company in the world. [By the way, I
agree.]

2) Steve Jobs is also completely unnecessary for Apple's continued success.
[Hmmmm]

I think I can agree with Gruber's wisdom in choosing to prognosticate no
further than a month. What made Apple remarkable _is_ going away today. From
here on out Apple will be as likely as the next company to blunder in the
marketplace by playing it safe. You will not see Tim Cook do anything half as
insane/brilliant as Jobs was capable of.

~~~
jsz0
Over the last 5-8 years or so there's been a formula to what made Jobs such a
successful leader of Apple. Smaller, faster, focus on human usability, make it
look nice, control the supply chain so you can build it cheap and make lots of
money, let your competitors make the mistakes and swoop in with your own
product with what you learn from their failures, don't bother building cheap
low margin junk, etc. It's almost a science at this point. Like any good
scientist Jobs surely has a lot of disciples within Apple who will carry that
tradition on and move it forward. Astronomy didn't die with Newton did it?
Apple will undoubtably change but if they continue to follow the values that
Jobs has drilled into them for the last decade they should be fine. Success is
the best teacher after all.

Since they've had some time to prepare for this transition I would expect that
Jobs put much focus and intensity into thinking about how you move forward
without him. That shift in focus may be a large part of why he stepped down
last year. If he's been working on a new product then it's not a new iPad or
Mac but instead it's how you build Apple to last another 20 or 30 years.

~~~
mkr-hn
A repeatable method can be copied. What does Apple do when one of their
competitors figures it out and starts implementing it?

~~~
michaelfeathers
If the repeatable method is, as mentioned above, "Smaller, faster, focus on
human usability, make it look nice.." then we all win regardless of whether
Apple does.

------
Estragon
What an irritating post, basically saying nothing but, "Hey, look, I saw this
coming!"

~~~
dcposch
"The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness,
humility. Directness. Truth."

lolwut?

I have deep respect for some of Apple's design leadership, but calling the
company humble is pure fanboyism.

The "truth" part is also questionable. Apple's product announcements are
usually gushing with superlatives, sometimes at the expense of accuracy:

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/03/steve-jobs-reality-
di...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/03/steve-jobs-reality-distortion-
takes-its-toll-on-truth/)

~~~
tyler_ball
I don't think he meant truth in terms of marketing (although I'm hard-pressed
to think of a case where Apple has outright lied in their ads, but maybe in a
release) but truth as design fundamental.

Based on the context of that sentence I would say Gruber meant it more in the
way of "truth to materials"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_to_materials>) in which Apple's design is
reductive and efficient to the user. No ornament beyond the materials that
construct the product.

~~~
trezor
I see you are trying to draw attention away from the fact that Apple has on
repeated occations shown to be dishonest, disengenious and outright
misrepresenting competitors by presenting information in ways they knew to be
wrong.

I see you do that and I wonder why on earth anyone would be so loyal to a
_corporation_ that they would be willing to drag their own credibility down to
defend the credibility of a corporation which in they have no vested interest.
It baffles me and makes no sense.

That aside, let's get back to what you said:

 _I don't think he meant truth in terms of marketing ...snip... but truth as
design fundamental._

Can you elaborate on what you think this is supposed to mean, apart from being
a divertion away from the fact that Apple, more than any other company
currently out there, manipulates and lies to their audience and to sustain
their image as "different"?

~~~
tyler_ball
I'm not loyal to Apple. I do like Gruber's writing though, so I was defending
his use of the word 'truth'. I said what I thought it meant, including a
related link to the concept on Wikipedia.

What are some examples in which Apple misrepresents customers?

------
pooriaazimi
_Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself._

True.

~~~
kristofferR
I completely agree. I will gladly bet $100 on that Apple, without Steve Jobs'
help, will create a new product in the coming decade that'll revolutionize (or
even create) a market completely like they've done with the iPod, iPhone, iPad
and many other products.

Steve Jobs may not be the CEO anymore, but his spirit and philosophy will be
alive and well in Apple for a long time to come, no matter what happens with
him personally.

~~~
teyc
Buy 1 Apple Share.

~~~
hugh3
If Apple shares come down to $100 you should buy more than one.

~~~
kosei
Apple isn't coming down to $100 from $375 - not anytime soon at least - don't
be crazy.

------
Tichy
I have to say, I am more concerned about Steve Jobs than about Apple. Today's
news made me sad because the world will miss contributions from a genius.

I am confident that we will have nice computing hardware in the future. Even
today, Apple are not the only ones to deliver.

But there is/was only one Steve Jobs.

Guess I am one of the few on HN who doesn't own Apple stock, so I am free to
just worry about the man and not the company.

~~~
j_col
Totally agree, lets hope the man makes a full recovery. While I'm not a fan of
Apple, I do appreciate his profound impact on this industry.

------
A-K
Gruber at his best. I get the feeling that he's had large pieces of this
particular post in the works for quite some time.

~~~
technoslut
I have to agree. It's been awhile since I've read something like this from
him. Well-chosen words throughout the whole post.

~~~
juliano_q
_The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness,
humility._

Good text, but maybe not well-chosen words throughout the whole post. Humility
is a little too much.

~~~
pohl
I find humility in things like deciding to ship without copy/paste, or the
decision to ship the initial phone without an SDK. These decisions are an
implicit admission that the company wasn't able to get these things
sufficiently polished or thought-through to include in a given iteration.

~~~
yequalsx
That's an interesting take. I've not thought of it that way. Apple doesn't
include everything a device obviously should have in the first iteration but
what it does include it does very well.

All of the iPad competitor devices absolutely suck at looking up the
definition of a word in an ebook. (The ones I've tried that is.) On the iPad
it is so simple, so intuitive, and quite fast. When they do something they do
it well.

~~~
CrazedGeek
Er, what? At least in the Kindle app on Honeycomb, you just long press a word
to see its definition.

~~~
technoslut
You don't understand that the Kindle is geared towards something very
specific. Apple is building an entire OS. You can three-finger tap to get the
dictionary, after highlighting, in iOS 5.

Sidenote: Apple views these gestures as the equivalent to keyboard shortcuts.
For the end user you want to create the obvious so they won't be confused.

~~~
CrazedGeek
I don't think that select and three-finger-tap is anywhere close to obvious-
doing anything with more than two fingers is already pretty rare on iOS.

------
st3fan
_The thing to keep in mind is this: Apple tomorrow, a week from now, and next
month is the exact same Apple from yesterday, a week ago, and last month._

Don't know about that. Apple, like all hi-tech companies, is constantly
changing, adapting, finding new ways, dealing with change, innovation, etc.

~~~
watty
I thought the same thing - that'd be called denial.

~~~
watty
I know my first comment got down voted but perhaps it was because I didn't
provide enough details?

Apple will continue being Apple - that is they won't change names, they'll
continue innovating and creating amazing products. But to say they'll be the
same Apple with and without Steve Jobs is silly and belittles the importance
of having Steve in the company in the first place. There's no doubt that the
path of Apple will be different.

------
MikeCapone
I thought that the Slaughterhouse-Five reference at the end was appropriate.
Stuff happens, we need to deal with it as best as we can and keep looking
ahead. That's what Steve always does.

~~~
cookiecaper
Ah yes, I can tell that Steve has this personal quality because of the layout
of the iPhone.

~~~
MikeCapone
I'll assume this is sarcasm. I was basing this on his biography.

------
aculver
One of the first tweets I read in the minutes after this news broke was
"@gruber Well? Help us process this, John." I'm glad he didn't waste any time.

~~~
untog
Really? No offense intended to Gruber but I really don't see what his blog
post says that dozens, if not hundreds of people haven't already said.
Including in the comments on HN.

~~~
technoslut
Good writing isn't necessarily the message itself but how the message is
delivered.

------
tonetheman
How exactly is a company a fractal design? What the hell does that mean
really?

Seriously how does this apple-ass-clown constantly make it to the front page?

Apple is not a person it is a company. Steve might be full of humility, Apple
is not.

~~~
xand
Completely agree. Why is this militant fanboy's posts always front page? It's
overly biased dribble every time.

~~~
kanamekun
Fractals have a property called self-similarity, where "a self-similar object
is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself."

John is saying that Apple's products have an "Apple-ness", as does each app on
each product, each feature within each app, etc.

He is suggesting that the zen-like simplicity of Apple can be found at many
different levels of the organization. I don't think it's overly biased
dribble... it's an eloquent point that Apple Inc. is a culture (cult?) with a
clearly identifiable philosophy that permeates every element of the org.

~~~
jgruber
Exactly.

~~~
jpitz
"You write on your site; I write on mine."
<http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair>

It _still_ isn't clear whether the parent is Daring Fireball's author ( but I
don't suppose I doubt it much )

~~~
macrael
Verified: <http://twitter.com/#!/gruber/status/106762517526745089>

~~~
jpitz
Thank you!

------
Zakharov
After reading that I had to stop and remind myself that Jobs isn't dead yet;
the article read like an obituary.

------
sigzero
It wasn't a surprise to anyone. Everyone knew it would happen eventually. He
is still remaining the Chairman of the Board, so he will be around for a bit
in that role. I see nothing changing for the immediate future but we will see.

------
rockmeamedee
I think he summed it very well with Vonnegut at the end.

So it goes.

------
joppa_road
i just can't get the words of dennis hopper from apocalypse now out of my
head: when he dies, it dies, man.

