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Comment by talmand | Hacker News Reader

1. Wozniak 2. Lasseter (and others) 3. Ive

His success was being involved with people with genius and vision that were willing to put up with his shit.

I love Woz, but he's demonstrated no ability to create an impression in the marketplace since his time working with Jobs (arguably an unfair assessment as he largely retired). Jobs turned Pixar into an animation studio and gave Lasseter a place to practice his talents. Ive was working at Apple for years before Jobs came back and put his talents to use (not to mention that Ive's design efforts are only one of a huge swath of things Apple started knocking out of the park after Jobs was back in the chair). That's not just success-through-association.

Woz had the ideal of giving everything away for free. Of course he had no business sense.

Pixar wanted to be a studio, Jobs wanted it to be a hardware/software company. The people of Pixar forced Jobs into letting it be what it is today.

Jobs recognized Ive for what he is and then Apple became what it is today.

Like I said, Jobs was good at latching on to people with vision and genius to make what him what he is.

> The people of Pixar forced Jobs

Jobs had a controlling interest in Pixar. Nobody forced him. Pixar would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would never have existed and we'd have never heard of Woz without Jobs.

Nobody is that lucky. It's like winning the lottery 3 times. Once is luck. 3 times means there's a guiding finger on the roulette wheel.

Latching on is an odd way to describe something that happened repeatedly. You're dismissing Jobs singular talent: assembling groups of skilled people and giving them an environment that let them create incredible things. He was genius level at this.

I think Woz is down on Jobs, but Lasseter, Catmull, Ive, Cook, Fred Anderson and others all spoke highly of him.

I'm not dismissing that talent, I'm pointing it out.

It was his vision that made him such a joy to be "latched onto." It's too easy to dismiss building collaborative environments with extreme talent underneath you. People aren't just cattle you can find and latch onto. It's often a reciprocal relationship.

This claim is delusional. The stories about Jobs' vision, product/engineering judgement, and ability to get others to share it are very convincing. They stretch for decades. He basically worked his entire career to put creative computing tools into people's hands (Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad). He did not just happen to get lucky to "be involved with people with genius and vision."

The iDevices are not really creative computing tools. They're mostly about consumption and, in the case of iPhones, communication.

Really expressing creativity in computing requires a richer interface, at least a keyboard and a mouse.

You're saying like it's easy to just find a talented person and associate yourself to them and everything else will just work.

BTW things that Ive wasn't involved in when SJ returned to Apple:

- Bring Next software to Apple and create OSX from it

- Software UI/UX design (Ive is mainly a product designer. And it's much more than "let's make colorful plastic" but how to do it so that it looks right, in which colors or how do you actually build this so that it is thin but resistant)

- Simplify product lines and improve focus

- Be involved in the "Think Different" campaign (the bozos at the top level wanted to go with a "We're back" campaign that was proposed to them)

"His success was being involved with people with genius and vision that were willing to put up with his shit."

Which was in no way an accident.

Jobs talent was identifying these people, and building environments around them that maximized their talents, while also identifying how to translate those ideas into products people wanted to pay money to buy.

All three of those guys were/are clueless about business until Jobs made their ideas work.

I believe that I made that clear. He was a salesman, obviously a great one, for other people's ideas.

No. He was a businessman and a product guy.

He could sell, but as a side effect.

I see this too often from fellow developers - anyone pushing business objectives and strategy instead of engineering choices is a "salesman". It's not true at all.

Calling Jobs a salesman is like calling Einstein a Civil Rights campaigner. Certainly they both did that, and did it well, but it sort of misses the major thing they were good at.

How the heck did you come up with Ive as being #3?

Did Ive make the brilliant decision for the 4-square powerMac/iMac product strategy abandoning the dozens of previous models?

I'm guessing no.

That's in no way a counter-argument.

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