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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Steve may not design the product, but he is the hard-grain sandpaper that gets a design from prototype to best in market.

Ars says it best:

"On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that's not his superpower . .. He is Apple's übercritic: one man to pare a torrent of creativity and expertise down to a handful of truly great products by picking apart every prototype, challenging every idea, and finding the flaws that no one else can see."

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a...

Further reading on this process in action - Steve's take on the Segway design:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-ste...

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I actually had dinner with a well-known hedge fund manager a few months ago and while talking about Blackberries and iPhones, he mentioned "that nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs"

Sums it up for me pretty well.

Bill Gates rather puts the lie to that.

...but of course Gates is an ubercritic too and only "appropriated" from the best (Zerox PARC), just like Jobs.

Well, it's a little more subtle than that. Microsoft produced some of the earliest and most important applications for Macintosh (and still does). Bill sent a famous letter advising Jobs to license the Mac OS widely (which was honest advice, based on Bill's later actions). A lot of Microsoft's success relative to Apple is where Apple refused to participate in a market (e.g., OSes for commodity hardware) rather than a pure competitive "bet against".

> which was honest advice

Not really.

Gates already had a "Microsoft tax" in place for generic x86 computers, so, any sale of an x86 box running a generic Apple OS would also imply in a sale of an OEM license of DOS. At that time, Gates was developing Windows (perhaps doubting they could pull it off, thus, misleading Apple into spending money on something they regarded as very difficult or impossible) to compete with Apple's proprietary hardware/software stack.

Without hardware differentiation, Apple would quickly fail.

So, no, I don't think that was honest advice and, much to his credit, neither did Jobs.

If you read the letter (http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/memo.html), Gates's advice was to license Mac hardware technology to OEMs, enabling a "Mac-compatible" hardware market in which licensing the Mac OS would be feasible.

It is easy to forget that in 1985, the modern assumption that all computers are identical Intel-specified x86 boxes was not yet in place.

He does? How?

Microsoft was happy to place bets on every system they could. Bill Gates didn't bet against anyone. He placed lots of bets on lots of systems, knowing that one would work out. The IBM PC is what made their fortune. But the bets they placed on other systems were already doing very well for them. Including on Apple.

The Microsoft-Apple relationship began in 1977 with Microsoft introducing Applesoft BASIC and later licensing it to Apple. Microsoft SoftCard followed in 1980, enabling Apple machines to run to programs designed for the CP/M. Sure, there was the infamous MS-DOS deal with IBM. But in the same time period Steve Jobs visited Microsoft to demo early prototypes of the Macintosh, and Microsoft was the first major company to develop programs for the Mac. In the end Microsoft BASIC and Microsoft Multiplan were shipped simultaneously with the introduction of the Macintosh, and Microsoft announced at the launch that Word, Chart, and File would ship soon.

When I look back at the history, I see no sign that Bill Gates was betting against Steve Jobs. His most successful bet was not on Steve Jobs. But he had lots of bets on Jobs as well.

For more on the history, see http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h...

Early on, before a leader in the PC market was established, investors had the choice of betting which horse would win--Bill Gates at Microsoft or Steve Jobs at Apple.

Many people did get rich betting on Gates, so indirectly, yes, Bill Gates does show that people have gotten rich betting against Jobs. The hyperbole is nice, but only that--hyperbole.

Isn't that choice a false dichotomy? A bet on Gates is not a bet against Jobs.

An investor who could only envisage one winner may be a little naive. It's not a horse race.

Actually it pretty much was a horse race. How many PC manufacturers were there in the 80s? How many in the 90s?

A bet on Gates is not a bet against Jobs.

Yes it was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh

"The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows."

Check your timeline. By 1990 betting on Microsoft was not betting against Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Windows 1.0 was released in the same year. However Windows struggled at that point. According to Microsoft (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistorydesktop.mspx for confirmation) the first successful version of Windows was Windows 3.0. That was released in 1990, and its main competitor was a severely mismanaged Apple. At that point Bill Gates was emphatically not competing against Steve Jobs.

So, when Gates bought 150M of Apple stock in 97, was he betting against himself? Worked out to be a winning bet for Gates.

As Jobs said at the time: "We have to let go of a few notions here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose.”

So, when Gates bought 150M of Apple stock in 97, was he betting against himself?

Pretty much, yes. It made him seem like less of a monopolist.

Worked out to be a winning bet for Gates.

That's what happens when you bet on every horse in the race. It's something that Microsoft does a lot.

When you're investing in Microsoft and not in Apple, that's a bet against Apple. And it wasn't just investors that had to make that bet ... software developers and customers had to pick.

In the early '90 support for Apple's hardware / OS was a second class citizen and it still is in many areas.

Surely (not betting on) != (betting against)

The original quote was 'nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs'. The fact that at times Microsoft had close dealings with Apple does not stop the fact that their biggest bet of all - on the IBM-PC, commoditized hardware and the Windows OS itself - was quite clearly in competition with the Macintosh and Apple.

This was 'a bet against Steve Jobs', and it made Bill Gates (and many others) quite, quite rich.

Nonsense. When you are "betting" on every platform in the market, it's not betting. Try going to the track and betting on every horse in a race. You'll lose money.

Microsoft is a software company, Apple is a hardware company. They overlap but if you look at it through that fundamental lens you'll understand. Gates bet on software, Jobs on hardware.

Wait a minute... Bill Gates was on top when he retried. Jobs hasn't retired yet. This game ain't over...

Gates mostly bet against John Sculley, Mike Spindler, etc.

I dislike these kinds of statements because, although they might have a kernel of truth, they tend to deflect useful criticism and inspection of a company's operation. The kernel of truth in this case is that Steve Jobs has a very good intuition of what people want and what they find to be aesthetically pleasing. However, I'm sure that the closed, proprietary nature of the various iOS platforms and their general hostility towards free software aren't exactly benefits that other companies should emulate.

Besides that, I will say that even if Jobs wasn't involved in the actual designing of Apple products, he's a very charismatic director and has a good intuition on what really excites people. Such qualities are generally rare to find in the human population.

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