It's a shame the article does not have any content at all about how it was like working with Steve Jobs. It's an article about the design process they used, with very little info anyway.
Agreed, this just seemed like a bird's eye view of things. I've read accounts elsewhere that included recollections of actual conversations, including the words and tone that were used. That to me is more relevant as it provides context for what it was actually like.
I read this article back in 2011... it always stayed with me. The idea that once you put your idea out there, it's no longer yours. That the vision is a shared thing. That pot of soup, is a brilliant concept.
Last year I was working for a startup, I was working with a man I greatly respected, and still do, and he's crazy smart. However he was also my boss, which meant that at the end of the day his opinions mattered just a bit more than mine. Which is fine for decisions, but sucked in a collaborative design.
There was this large project going on, we were building some tech that was going to be the core of our business, and together we had been thinking through this problem for a long time. Then one day I came to the office, and he said "I think i got it, now I want you to listen to the whole thing first before you add anything... cause what I have works". It turned out to be the first sentence in a really terrible period between us. All sense of collaboration was gone after that. It was him telling me how things were going to be, and anytime I tried to contribute (add or change something) I was being insubordinate. I started to get very emotional, which lead to him getting emotional... I passionately believed in a few core concepts, and sometimes i'd even get through to him, but then a few days later he'd forget my argument and get really angry at me. If he was just another senior engineer, I think things would have gone much better, but the fact that he was my boss made things crazy difficult. Conversations would end with "because I have 40 years of experience". I felt like I was no longer allowed to contribute if my idea was too drastically different.
My point is, when you're in a position of power having an actual equal design collaboration is hard to accomplish. Everyone is passionate about their own ideas. Reading this article made me respect Steve because if this is true, he accomplished a very difficult task.
I'm a guy with 40 years of experience, and I'm working with a 20 year old. I learned a technique awhile back and a strategy that is-- whoever has to implement it gets to make a lot of decisions. So I give advice and suggestions and he does his thing and more than once he comes back and says "You were right". Never gloat, this is how you guide people-- because you can't micromanage programmers, you can give them suggestions or even directions or ideas, but you can't control them.
This is the sense I got from Steve Jobs as well- he was passionate and he would say things definitively, but he understood collaboration. He was persuadable.
I am persuadable, my biggest lament though is that so few people try. So many people just demand that things be done a certain way- and often with the worst excuse "that's how other companies do it" (or "that's standard practice" or even "best practices" -- which is just saying "I belong to a cargo cult.")
> if this is true, he accomplished a very difficult task.
I think this is critically important, and it is clear that people don't get this at all.
For Steve, I have seen it described by different people, his ability to change his mind even though he was passionate about his previous position. He could be persuaded.
This is key for everything in life. If you can't or won't change your opinion, you are necessarily stuck with the sometimes poor initial choices you make. Over-investment in the process over the result is problem in many places.
You would think, but 9/10 people making comments about Steve Jobs on the internet describe him as only a savvy marketeer and business man. Steve didn't invent anything, doesn't know how to program bla bla, is how it goes. While Steve Jobs was an asshole in many ways this is a gross injustice to his legacy. He clearly had a lot of input and influence on Apple products and was important in making them good.
But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of products to take this view.
I think the influence was a high level of systems thinking. He didn't just design products, he designed what you could do with products, and he designed how and why people would want them - which is a level of insight that eludes anyone who thinks a product is a list of features or (worse) a technology stack.
Having said that, iMovie was good, iPhoto was okay-to-good, but iTunes has always been awful.
I've never understood why it was so badly designed. (And it's getting worse, by all accounts.)
iTunes is certainly awful to use, but the interesting part of that story is not iTunes itself, but the work and negotiation that had to happen to license music from all the major labels to populate the iTunes marketplace. Sony had a huge first-mover advantage in that space (their own global music label, movie studio, video game console AND the Walkman brand), but was too busy forcing its disparate businesses to compete against each other.
The end result being that they completely missed the boat on the then-nascent digital music market, and less than 15 years later, have spun off most of those brands and hardware-wise, Playstation aside, are limited to making (very nice) camera sensors for iPhones.
My favorite play was when he flew his private jet to the UK to bribe the man he stole the ipod design from to testify in court that he(Steve) did NOT steal the idea from Sony. Good stuff.
So did Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergiy Brin, Jerry Yang etc. (steve case, fecesbook, myspace and other shitty cut-n-paste non-algorithmic efforts were underway many knew how to cut and paste myspace text entry boxes to spy on girls and call users "dumb fucks" in the AOL/Iomega space).
Yes, I could write a whole book on the details of each person I work closely with. There's always lessons in subtle things they occasionally do/say, that nevertheless have significant impacts. This article is... nice but fluff.
Example: "As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us. He was basically the Product Manager for all of the products I worked on, even though there eventually were other people with that title, who usually weren't allowed in the room :)"
Self-contradictory. He made himself de facto Product Manager — more powerful actually, since other Product Managers "usually weren't allowed in the room". Virtually by definition, the top boss is whatever manager they decide to be.
(Did the author ever analyze the power relations in each meeting? Would the boss even tolerate someone who was too good at it?)
Apple paid 400M to acquire NeXT, but NeXT's management ended up taking over the company. So really, NeXT paid -$400M to acquire Apple. It's like how Pixar acquired Disney for -$7.4B.
Software too. Mac OS X (and later, iOS) is a direct continuation of NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP OSes. Objective-C came to Apple from NeXT. All the Cocoa APIs used on the Mac come from NeXT, and the UIKit APIs used for iOS development are a direct descendant of them. The modern Apple contains very little of pre-1996 Apple but lots of pre-1996 NeXT.
Here's what I always wondered: how much did Steve need Apple? (The other way around is well known). But couldn't Steve Jobs have done the iPod, iPhone, iPad etc. without Apple? Apple was pretty much in shambles right, when he returned? So what was there that he couldn't do with NeXT (or any other company for that matter)?
At the time NeXT was not in great shape either, IIRC they where contemplating killing their hardware in favor of just providing an alternative OS and where starting to pitch their visual IDE in the market. The consensus at the time is that NeXT would not have made it if not for the acquisition. They where not bankrupt by any means but what little market share they had gained had started to erode.
Slightly before this time, at the dawn of the web I had a NeXT box and they where great machines, but they where expensive and outside of early web dev and some scientific stuff they where not heavily used. Sun was eating at their scientific market with the Sun Stations and web dev kind of took off on every platform so the price point became less and less justifiable. My personal opinion is that NeXT would not have survived had Apple not come knocking at their door and would have suffered the same fate as BeOS, though jobs had the resources to drag it out far longer that Be did. It was not his success at NeXT that brought Apple back to the table with hat in hand, but rather it was his success with Pixar.
It was a time of consolidation, The Amiga had died, Atari was long out of the game and the Mac OS was aging rapidly hardware was fixed the only two options on the table where PC and Mac everything else had fallen by the wayside and the Mac's operating system was on life support. Copeland had died which was supposed to be the savior OS and as such the Mac, while holding it's own in pure hardware specs given the move to the PPC was not capitalizing on modern hardware or computing due to the OS. Meanwhile the hardware game was set so Steve was having no luck breaking into the market with his own hardware platform. Apple and NeXT needed each other and Apple needed Steve so it was a do or die for both. Apple was on the ropes pretty bad, there stock was $11 a share (god it sucked to be a broke college kid) and Gates shortly after this point would bail them out with a loan to stave off anti-trust allegations for another decade. Had the NeXT / Apple merger not happened both companies would not exist today. Kind of funny to think how close one of the largest companies of the times, almost blinked out of existence.
Apple was in a slump. They had millions of customers just waiting for Apple to stop being stupid and start being awesome again. That meant that when e.g. the iMac was released, there were a ton of customers primed to buy it. When the iPod was released, that customer base was ready to give it a try.
NeXT, on the other hand, struggled from the beginning. They sold a total of 50,000 computers, ever. They had, relative even to Apple in its deepest slump, zero name recognition and zero customer base.
Resources probably mattered a lot too. Even when doing poorly, Apple could sink significant resources into new projects. The problem with pre-Jobs Apple was that the sank their resources into bad (or badly executed) projects like Newton, Copland, and Gershwin. They were able to put that into developing the iPod, whereas I think NeXT just didn't have the money for such a project.
Quote:"Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers."
Sometimes I think Apple guys are megalomaniac, but this guy beats it. It looks like it happened due to iMovie, not to the newly born digital cameras or Napster.
People think Steve was arrogant, but this guy takes the cake. Steve would always thank the whole team and everyone involved when a product was introduced. I believe at Pixar (couldn’t find a reference) that he pushed for everyone at the company to be in the movie credits, right down to the janitorial staff. This guy is all about taking credit for the work of a very small number of people and comparing himself to Steve. Plus, this is just poorly researched and frankly just lame, for lack of a better word. Some snippets:
- I’ll call him Steve (Everyone called him Steve. Employees still refer to execs by their first name)
- "I worked with Steve Jobs" can mean, "I saw him in the elevator once when I was at a meeting at Apple" …… I actually worked with the guy, and I'm realizing that perhaps I worked with him more closely than almost anyone (Who cares? Where are the stories about working with him? You should have more stories than anyone)
- I was employee #40 (No one cares. Employee #1765 could change the world more than you)
- We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW became more mainstream. (We were so ahead of the curve that what we worked on wasn’t even given a name. WWW? I was around then and I don’t remember many people calling it that)
- We were done ahead of schedule, as it turned out (No you weren’t. No one who works in software, especially a 1.0 product, believes you)
- I think it was October or November of 1998 (Try using the WWW to look it up. It was October and it was actually 1999)
So far, that covers 2/3rds of the article. Still no mention of what it’s like to work with Steve.
- What he was passionate about was, I think, quite simple: he liked to build products. I do, too. This we had in common. (Incredible, it’s like you were soulmates)
- So I think that in some very real sense, I had a better understanding of Steve and how he worked, and what motivated him, than almost anyone in the world. (You should really write an article about what Steve was like to work with. With lots of stories since you were so close to him.)
- It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike in that way, and in that process. (The whole article is self-serving. It’s far more about you than Steve. That’s right, even I call him Steve from outside the secret cabal you were part of.)
So, in summary, Glenn Reid is amazing, almost Steve-like, and what it was like to work with Steve consisted going into rooms with whiteboards and throwing out ideas and debating the details of a product.
Arrogant engineers don’t make great products. Oh, you didn’t mention your engineering team. And the team that made the hardware. Or you EPM that kept you on schedule so you could ship early or something. What about people that wrote the low-level software your app depended on? Did you write everything from the kernel on up to iMovie? You have very little in common with Steve other than you were in the same room with him a lot and apparently have no actual stories to tell.
