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.
It's also important not to leave out his ability to convince people of his vision. From Jurveston:
"During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation."
He used it in negotiations, with employees, with customers, and partners. I know he certainly used it with me - I eventually had to _force_ myself never to watch a product rollout by Jobs, I was so incapable of not becoming infatuated with the next great thing he would reveal...
Outside of his RDF, I still believe, that essentially, his central accomplishment was to take technical gadgets, refine, demand, and finesse, until they came out so beautifully put together, we just had to have them.
His ability to attract and motivate great talent was probably the third prong that contributed to his success. And you are right, to suggest he was just a tweaker, is a gladwellic troll that he's posing to simplify a scenario to fit in well with his article.
All you gotta do is explore is cosmology, psychology, and Buddha-nature. Steve did the thinking that most were afraid to do and convinced with tenacity.
>Gladwell [...] adds this marginally related story about tweakers so the entire article isn't regurgitating [...] anecdotes
I think you're missing the main point here. The computer revolution, as a large scale technological and social transformation, does bear comparison to the Industrial Revolution. Where does someone like Steve Jobs stand in this comparison? He was obviously neither the inventor of a fundamental technological advance (James Watt) nor the guy who provided the money and business expertise (Matthew Boulton). The article makes a good case that the closest analogy is actually with the people who took Watt's steam engine and eventually improved its efficiency fourfold (and, BTW, the term "tweakers" comes from the referenced Meisenzahl & Mokyr paper).
However, there are thousands/millions of people that are "tweakers". That isn't Jobs' only talent or even his most salient characteristic. (The title of the article is "Steve Job's real genius".)
Did any of the tweakers mentioned in the article start 3 companies and make billions doing it?
I think it is backlash for giving Jobs all the credit for everything, which is a mistake. I agree he didn't "invent" the iPhone, as Obama claimed. He led its development. But it's an equal mistake to say that all he did was tweak things, which the article claims explicitly.
Yes, many of the "tweakers" discussed did achieve success in multiple business ventures (and took patents).
It's not a disparaging term, so there's no reason to call it backlash. This is simply an observation that there is a (often overlooked) class of people who are 1. technically competent 2. very good at polishing and perfecting others' ideas, rather than coming up with them de novo.
The paper credits these people with playing the main part in the Industrial Revolution, and it's actually quite creditable to say Steve Jobs might have been among the best of them.
Being a tweaker is a fair assessment of Steve Jobs merit. One month after his death, this article is the first balanced article I've read among more than one hundred hagiographies posted all over the web.
No one really "creates" anything if one isn't allowed to build off of what already exists. We would literally be re-inventing the wheel right now if we weren't allowed to look at past inventions. Gladwell is one of those authors who appeal to the masses with his oversimplified pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo. I'd like to know what Gladwell has actually innovated in his life or how he changed the world.
"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.
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."
"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).
> 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 think you may be framing the issue in the wrong way. Here's a little anecdote from my own experience: When I first studied math, I could solve isolated problems but I still had no feeling for what I was doing. One day, I stumbled upon a more theoretical book: Rudin's Principles of mathematical analysis (or Baby Rudin). The rigor, the very thought process was completely foreign to me. Sometimes I spent an entire day on retracing a few lines of proof. On the side, I read a delightful little book by Polya on How to solve problems. While the former gave me stuff to chew on, the latter gave me words to understand what I was doing when I was chewing. After much huffing and puffing, one day I "got" it. I really did. And to paraphrase SJ here, "I did it in a big way."
If I had stopped right there, I might not know about measure theoretic probability, the theory of point processes, copulas, or any other more or less specialized subjects. But once I crossed that point I always felt confident I _could_ learn whatever subject I chose to and do it quickly if called for.
Even for completely foreign topics, I may not know the details yet, the definitions, the important theorems or the lesser ones that help in establishing them or that shorten their proofs. But I now know how to read mathematical books, the difference between an important and a not so important theorem, what to look for.
Without knowing SJ personally, and only half-way through his biography, I think the above is a valid analogy for the kind of understanding SJ must have had for technology. He somehow "got" it, and that allowed him to intuit special areas quickly, select among alternatives, and perhaps be a better editor of more narrowly focused, deeper minds than any single one of them could have been on its own.
I'm not saying he was singular in this, or that his "getting" it was _the_ reason for his later success. For that, you need more, starting with certain type of self-awareness, social aptitude, luck, etc. etc. But as for his technical compass, I'm pretty sure this is all he needed. If you have this type of confidence and understanding, you can always dig into something and specialize when the problem in front of you calls for it. Or you can learn on whom to rely, whom to poll, etc.
That's the difference between a Ballmer, Lazaridis, any of the other management types with business school backgrounds, say, on one side and Jobs, Page or Zuckerberg, say, on the other.
Steve may have just gotten lucky to find him, but Ali Ozer ended up shaping the NeXTStep libraries that became Cocoa (when naming infrastructures after hot drinks became the rage ;-), and has maintained his control of shaping ever since.
So Jobs got "lucky" (luck favors the prepared, of course) in his finding Ali to obsess about the NS and Cocoa libraries in all dimensions, with the same kind of taste-making abilities as Jobs had at the larger whole ecosystem level.
I'm sure part of it is that Steve Jobs actually understood programming (even if he wasn't a programmer himself) - coupled with his desire that things should be beautiful.
He said that it was a mistake only taking the GUI to Apple, and he should have taken the whole Smalltalk environment. This in turn lead directly to why Next (and hence Cocoa) uses Objective-C. The fact that he would argue with Eric Schmidt in a car park about the merits of why Obj-C is a better O-O language (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/eric-schmidt-on-steve-j...) says a lot.
I think Job's approach to development goes something like this:
1. Build a talented team.
2. Keep it small.
3. Give them time.
4. Keep them focused on the end goal not the internals of the project.
5. Cut all non essential features.
6. Don't tolerate crap.
7. Turn your product announcements into theatrical performances.
8. Have as your main goal keeping the end users happy, not the middle men.
8: That's what killed Kodak. Decided their customers were the retailers, not the people who used the film. Wouldn't make the massive switch to digital because middlemen liked the foot traffic film created (and digital didn't) and threatened to drop carrying Kodak products altogether if digital was pushed. Funny, the middlemen had little trouble switching to digital when customers made the switch ... and the film market vanished.
1) Ask smart questions to smart people. Steve seemed to be a master at this - he can sense when someone is glossing over something, and attacks it. I.E.: "What do you mean, 'for now'; will there be problems later on?". Most people don't want to hear the things you clearly omit. Steve went for the jugular.
2) Experience. Heard of the Next computer? Uneconomic - the whole automated assembly, and razor-sharp magnesium corners, and 16 different shades of black thrown out because they weren't quite right drove the costs up too much. Heard of WebObjects? Steve had his failures. He tended to salvage what he could, restart them, and finally get them working; but he still had failures. I bet he learnt a lot from them.
To be fair, the Cube was expensive, but the pizza box-shaped NeXTStations were competitively priced to similarly-powered high-end PCs and Macs of the early 90s.
You'll be surprised how little time people have for useless embellishment if you keep them busy with real work.
Which is another way of saying that if a team is small and optimally sized they can't go off and do random nonsensical reinvention of wheels.
Many times parsimony is elegance.
When I first looked into it, I was surprised at the extent to which Mac OS X was based on Unix. It seems like they reuse as much as they can, and innovate only where they need to.
I agree wholeheartedly. To compare, as Gladwell does, Microsoft's "copying" of Mac to make Windows to Apple's "copying" of Xerox PARC's half-assed UI to make Mac is completely missing the point.
Jobs produced "copies" of things that transcended the things he copied (he "copied" an MP3 player with (a) a simpler but better MP3 player, (b) cross-platform software with automated ripping and an online store, (c) seamless integration, (d) negotiated rights with all the major labels that boggled the minds of rivals (see Gates's reaction in the Isaacson book) and also allowed indie artists direct access to their fans). And, in my opinion, the iPod is the least of Jobs's major accomplishments.
I don't want to downplay the genius of the guy who developed the automated cotton mule. The early 19th century didn't afford opportunities to effect sweeping technological revolutions that our era does.
The idea that Jobs got the idea of the iPad from the Microsoft engineer who boasted about the tablet version of Windows is laughable. Isaacson's book (and other sources) document that Jobs was trying to source working touch screens before the Mac shipped, and carrying around designs for laptops in his pockets.
If Gladwell has a valid point to make in the entire article, it's that Gates's desire to fight malaria with his billions is commendable and visionary. I won't argue with that. Everything else is rubbish. (Someone, I think the Economist, suggested at some point that Gates was the greatest Robin Hood in history, which nicely implied that his billions were largely acquired by theft.)
Gladwell basically calls Jobs a tweaker. He didn't tweak products, he reinvented them. In fact, Jobs didn't have the skills to be a tweaker (the guys Gladwell compares Jobs to were essentially hardcore engineers).
Here's a simple example (from Isaacson's book):
When Jobs was working on the Apple II he wanted to build the power supply into the box but didn't want a fan, so he hired a guy to design a new kind of power supply that would meet his requirements. This guy _invented the switching power supply_ to meet those requirements.
This kind of thing occurs over and over in Jobs's story. (E.g. the mouse at Xerox -- which you'll recall Jobs "stole" from Xerox, but in fact was invented by Douglas Englebart -- had three buttons, cost a fortune, broke down frequently, and didn't scroll diagonally. The mouse on my mother's 128k Mac eventually failed after five years when its plastic feet were down flat.)
Have you ever used one of the Xerox PARC machines? I have, and I would hardly call it a "half-assed UI". In many ways, it was better than the Mac OS until OS X. The main problem with the Xerox PARC machines is that they couldn't/didn't get the cost below $20k. IIRC, the Apple Lisa also suffered a similar fate, and the 128K Mac was little more than a doorstop. The Xerox GUI instead was saved by Moore's Law, when the hardware could be made cheap and fast enough to make consumer products.
"The main problem with the Xerox PARC machines is that they couldn't/didn't get the cost below $20k."
They probably didn't really care too much, since they sold high-end office equipment, not consumer products. Even if they got the price down, it would have been sold by Xerox copier salesmen to businesses.
I have actually used one of the Xerox PARC machines. Three button mouse, you needed to know which button did what or it was useless. No diagonal scrolling...
Also, the use of the word "tweaker" is a stupid rhetorical trick...
Can anyone name a single product that Jobs released that had not already been proven in the marketplace by another company, in substantially the same form? I can only think of one: the Newton. And Jobs never made that mistake again.
'Tweaker' sounds perjorative, but in fact that was exactly Jobs' genius: recognizing the design details that others missed, the tweaks that would turn a good product into a great one.
The iPhone wasn't merely a "tweak" on existing cell phones, or even the Palm Pilot.
What's your standard? Name a few products. The Walkman? If the Walkman qualifies as an innovation, then surely the iPhone does.
Calling the Macintosh a tweak on the Xerox Alto I think is also hardly fair. If that is true, then all products ever released have been tweaks, which makes the distinction meaningless.
The iPhone wasn't merely a "tweak" on existing cell phones, or even the Palm Pilot.
Are you kidding? It was clearly a tweak of the Palm Pilot and the Treo phone. Same form factor, same 'one app open at a time' philosophy, same launch screen. The key tweak was eliminating the stylus.
Calling the Macintosh a tweak on the Xerox Alto I think is also hardly fair.
Why? It was certainly similar enough to litigate the issue. I'd agree though that the Mac was probably the riskiest product Jobs produced, in terms of predecessors in the market.
If that is true, then all products ever released have been tweaks...
Every once in awhile there is a real innovation. The aforementioned Newton, say, or the Wii-mote. The Walkman seems more like a tweak, there were already portable tape recorders in wide use.
I mean I suppose it depends on your definition of "substantially the same form" and "proven."
I'd argue that the Zen Jukebox did not prove that HDD MP3 players could be successful, and that Treos and other smartphones, though proven successful, were not substantially in the same form as an iPhone, and that previous tablets were proven failures and also not substantially in the same form as iPad's.
I think the iPad is really the best example of Jobs' talent being used in a capacity that wasn't just tweaking. Stylus input and finger input are just completely different ways to approach the user interface. An iPad isn't a tweak of previous failed Windows tablets, it's throwing out the basic premise of the machine ("a tablet is just like your computer but in the palm of your hand") and starting from scratch ("what is the purpose of a tablet?").
Stylus input and finger input are just completely different ways to approach the user interface.
I agree that getting finger input right was the critical factor, but I don't think it was at all obvious that it would produce a completely different user experience. Looking forward from five years ago, I don't think you could call it anything but a tweak---it's only with the benefit of hindsight (unless you share Jobs' unique talent) that you can see that a small design change (use your finger instead of a stylus!) could make such a big difference.
I disagree that it's a small design change. The decision to use finger input as opposed to stylus input has a cascading effect on the whole UI. Fingers are too fat to click on lots of little buttons, so you have to use direct manipulation everywhere you can.
Take something simple like zooming or scrolling a page. In Windows Mobile circa 2006, the basic paradigm was the same one you'd use on the Xerox Alto in 1973: click on scroll up/down buttons to scroll, click on a menu and then on zoom in/out to zoom. The stylus was just a less capable mouse on a smaller screen. On iOS circa 2007, you pinch to zoom the page and swipe to scroll it. There is no analogue to this in the previous Windows/Menus/Icons/Pointers paradigm.
I think the iOS UI is really the perfect example of something that wasn't just tweaking. Windows Mobile was just a tweak of the mouse-based Windows UI for stylus input. iOS threw away the Mac UI, predicated on the mouse, and started from scratch. "What does a UI look like when you start from the assumption that you're manipulating it with your fingers?"
This is a fair point, but that's the engineer's point of view. Looking at it from a product manager's perspective, why did so many decline to make the investment necessary to make touch work for the consumer? I would argue that they simply didn't perceive the enormous difference it would make (ie, that the risk was worth the reward). Faced with the engineering challenges you describe, they decided that there was just not enough difference between using a stylus and using touch to justify the cost. A small product change can still be very expensive to make.
I agree that's a proper description of why Microsoft, etc, didn't do touch first, but what exactly is that relevant to?
Your contention earlier was that stylus -> touch was a "tweak." My point is that it's not just a tweak, it's throwing out the existing model and starting from scratch. You implicitly acknowledge that by referencing the investment to make the change, an investment that is incurred by having to throw out the existing design and start over.
Touch was not a tweak. It was throwing out the steering wheel and asking "so now how do you drive the car?"
It was throwing out the steering wheel and asking "so now how do you drive the car?"
Exactly my point. Let's say it drives by telepathy. The car wouldn't change much: it would still have a driver and be driven on the road. It would still have an engine, passenger seating, storage space and cupholders. It would still at a glance look like any other car. But that apparently small change would result in a profound change in the user experience (and yes, profound engineering challenges for the maker). It's a better car. But it's not an entirely new class of transportation, just a tweak to an existing one, like the automatic transmission and hybrid engines.
A failed consumer product category, yes. But tablets have been in routine use in business for many years, and have been a profitable niche product. Jobs correctly surmised that the tweaks he'd made to the PDA to make the iPhone a big success could translate in a larger form factor to make a successful consumer tablet. But tablets were already a familiar product to millions of people when the iPad hit the market.
Not to be pedantic, but the iPad preceded the iPhone as a concept. Jobs requested a prototype multi-touch display that you could type on, saw inertial scrolling, and decided that the phone should come first. There's very little about the tablet product category that he "tweaked." He threw out the stylus and built a touch OS from scratch.
Good point. I'd agree that the real innovation in both the iPhone and iPad was touch. It seems obvious now that touch is a completely different experience from the stylus, but it wasn't obvious enough that anybody else made the big investment to make it work, before Jobs.
It is worth recognising though that touch did exist before iOS, something a lot of people don't realise. It wasn't in consumer products so much, but it had been out there for quite some time.
True. I was infatuated with the hyper expensive lemur for a while. Then came the iPhone/iPad. Jazzmutant must have had some terse meetings around that time.
Jobs left Apple in 1985, the Newton started development in 1987. John Scully was the executive excited about the Newton. Even though it was profitable, Jobs killed it on his return.
I haven't heard a story like that but if I were to guess it would be Jeff Hawkins from Palm. Because while the Newton while cool, it never reached pocket size.
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.