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Comment by TotlolRon | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry as thousands of Apple employees watched in awe wondering what have they been doing all this time.

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Right, Steve Jobs may have come up with an idea, but to make it work thousands of other employees had to design circuit boards, write code, and do the hard part.

Even as a fan of Mac products I think Steve Jobs gets too much credit. The idea is the easy part, making it work is the part that should be respected. Even with respect to the ideas themselves I wonder how much of the iPhone, the app store, and other innovations were envisioned by Steve Jobs personally, and how much of it was thought up by other smart engineers and technicians working for Apple?

For example the iconic Apple power adapter is credited to Steve Jobs, yet there are 12 names on the patent. (http://www.google.com/patents?id=C-IOAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...) So I have to wonder which engineers came up with which aspects.

> do the hard part

Relatively speaking: any moron can design a circuit board. What I mean is that, given a set of inputs and desired outputs, there are probably tens of thousands of engineers around the world who could design the iPod's circuit board. Given a set of design principles and a vision, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of designers around the world who could have come up with something similar to the iPhone. But how many people can

- see that vision and

- gather together the right minds and organize them in such a way that they implement it?

Most events have compound causes, but Steve Jobs was probably the biggest member of the cause for the iPhone event.

Nobody said he didn't deserve a lot of credit. It's the 'single-handedly' they are objecting to.

In that case, I'd say it qualifies as arguing over semantics since "CEO does X" is an oft-used stand-in for "CEO leads company to do X."

Semantics perhaps, but the phrasing was particularly off-putting in this article. I know it was the first thing I noticed. I don't think I'd want to work for Chris Dixon.

I am impressed by your making that determination from a single article. That kind of decisiveness can be useful. Or maybe you have other data.

His posts appear regularly here, and I was being polite.

And, perhaps most importantly, do the hard-assed negotiation and reality distortion with the telcos.

If you think the idea is the easy part, I question anything else that you might say.

Also, ideas are evolutionary. Go watch Steve Jobs' D8 interview. See how the iPhone didn't start as a phone, and then tell me Jobs doesn't deserve as much credit as he does.

Remember that this isn't about the iPhone as a device, but the device as an industry mindset changer. An idea goes beyond just the idea, and Jobs dared to envision and execute a strategy that put the phone before the carrier. If what Jobs did isn't that great, then why didn't anyone else do it?

Ah, not to talk down Mr. Jobs but over in Europe regulation has meant that cellphones were carrier-independent devices years before the appearance of the iPhone. That's partly how Nokia's brand got to be so strong.

I think Jobs' achievement with the iPhone was to look at existing technology like tablets and say 'look, these really are awesome, but they're limited to simple tasks. Cellphones are awesome because they're so portable and popular, but a bunch of buttons is an overly complex interface for the sort of tasks most people want to do with their phones. We can and we will shrink tablets down to pocket size and market them as phones instead of computers.'

>Ah, not to talk down Mr. Jobs but over in Europe regulation has meant that cellphones were carrier-independent devices years before the appearance of the iPhone. That's partly how Nokia's brand got to be so strong.

And this is the way that it should be - but it doesn't happen without sensible consumer protection laws.

"If you think the idea is the easy part, I question anything else that you might say."

Cue HN permathread on "Ideas are worthless" ...

Another example of good leadership vs bad leadership is to see what's happening at Microsoft. No dearth of smart people and engineers over there either.

why Bill Gates hand over the reins to Ballmer, I never understood.

"Even as a fan of Mac products I think Steve Jobs gets too much credit."

I couldn't agree more.

Jobs epitomizes everything that so many of us detest about big companies, so I have to wonder why anyone here actually likes or even respects him.

He doesn't invent squat, or developed any hardware, written any software... so why is it that it's ok for Jobs to claim sole credit for everything Apple produces?

At the same time, Microsoft not only bends over backward to take care of 3rd party software developers (most of the time), Microsoft also explicitly gives credit to the developers that wrote the software.

When Jobs released the mac, he had the mac programmed to announce that Jobs was its creator... never mind all of the people at Xerox PARC who actually invented all of the technology inside, including the UI.

And when Gates announced Windows 95, he brought out the development team and gave them credit.

So who's the better person? Obviously not Jobs.

I don't think it is "ideas",it is knowledge and experience, Steve has a lot of that.

You are making a fallacy, it is not ideas like I just dream and there it is:ideas, it is ideas like newton calculus ideas as a result of all their life working on them.

Steve is trained in figure it out what people need (marketing), materializing it and testing in the real world. Not as easy at it sounds because of unconscious incompetence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

I have seen companies with superb scientist and technical people struggle and fail because of bad managers, like a yacht with 700hp engines and broken rudder.

I don't think anyone wants to discount the work of the engineers but using the Microsoft Courier as a counter example we can see how engineers alone cannot force a product out the door. I remember reading an article a year or two ago about the iPhone development process and at some stage early in the game Jobs had to make the choice between what we know the iPhone to be today or what was a lot closer to an iPod Classic that could make phone calls. Obviously he made the right choice.

It hasn't occurred to you that many articles are shaped by PR departments?

Sorry ojbyrne, accidental downmod. Meant to upmod this damned phone interface is horrible for HN.

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