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Comment by jkcorrea | Hacker News Reader

For those interested, AllAboutSteveJobs.com keeps a pretty good repository of Jobs moments. My personal favorite is his 1997 WWDC talk [1]. In one talk he demonstrates what it is to be a great leader organizationally, publicly, and as a product visionary.

He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today.

He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy.

Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments.

[1] (full video): https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

[2] (insult excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

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I've always loved that "insult" excerpt in showing the reality distortion field in full sway.

He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". By the time 5 minutes has elapsed, he's mostly avoided the first question and everyone has completely forgotten the second question existed.

I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a question. They’re stating a challenge in the form of a question. This is something that happens here in the HN comments all the time, when people get into heated discussions.

If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion.

Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets.

There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.

> HyperCard

It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either.

The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.

The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.

The barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market.

There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents.

But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs.

Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.

And people watching the video don’t realize that the questioner was referencing a very rude comment Jobs had just made about a team of Apple developers, that had just been fired by Jobs, saying they had not done anything for seven years.

Was that mainly a criticism of those developers, or of management?

[Edit:] Okay, I see now it's referencing this part that I'd forgotten:

"I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people. They haven’t done anything in 7 years."

In reality, he would have been in the position to know.

When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do something interesting, and an army of really bad people, who think they can social engineer their way into coasting somewhere new that will succeed.

I am certain Jobs had this experience with NeXT.

> He says he's completely ignorant about the technology.

Yeah, contrast that with Elon twittering about floating floating point [0] and too many zeros in fp32 [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793

Apple was barely above comatose, running on vapors. The point was that even OpenDoc being "better" tech does not automatically mean Apple could/should make it into products and sell those products to customers. Apple needed to invest rapidly diminishing resources into actual products it can sell to actual customers that would save the company from imminent death.

Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'"

Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.

Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe from Mac OS at a time when Apple needed Microsoft's and Adobe's commitment to providing Mac versions of Office and Photoshop/Illustrator. Indeed, they even balked at porting their applications to the OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa API, which forced Apple to change its Rhapsody strategy and announce Carbon in 1998. But OpenDoc's component-based software model would have been an even greater disruption: Microsoft and Adobe might have balked at supporting a platform that would make it easier for upstarts to compete by selling components.

There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373

KDE attempted to bring OpenDoc-lite style components into itself ~2000 with KParts, while Gnome attempted the same with the CORBA based Bonobo system at the same time. Neither was successful - the true path to inter operating compound documents was the Web with HTML and JavaScript ultimately, but that didn’t start coming into its own until about 10 years later.

At least the IPC idea survived with D-BUS, and they could actually still do it, but the elephant in the room is that desktop fragmentation in Linux world is a big obstacle.

It's a mistake to lump the rest of his response under "platitudes." What he's saying there-work backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from the tech-is the strategy that took Apple from bankrupt to $2 trillion. Technical people dismiss it all the time. If the technology is better, the thinking goes, it will win out eventually. It's the thought process that launched the Zune, Windows Phone, and decades of attempts at tablets. Apple's entire existence is predicated on letting other "clever" companies try this and torpedoing them with worse but vastly more usable versions of their advanced technology.

It was both. Apple would never have succeeded without great engineers. I think he's downplaying the role that technology plays here to emphasise his point. What Apple/Steve did really well was to understand their market really well and channel technical efforts towards that and carefully curate the results. Another aspect that's often not noticed is how costs were managed on the other side. For instance to this day Apple doesn't support blue ray because it would deliver limited value but add to their bottom line. Similarly how they aggressively eliminated optical disks when they got the chance.

The answer is not perfect -- the questioner might be correct that Jobs doesn't have a handle on the tech side of things. But I did think that the answer was coherent. He concedes that, without going into details, OpenDoc may be the better option technically, and surely in a sort of contrived case it would be possible to come up with situations where it is. I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim given I am not familiar with whatever the actual arcane debate was at the time, but I immediately infer from context that this is the questioner mad that Apple is giving up superior technology in favour of broader adoption technology.

Then he says that it's actually not about the tech, it's about the extent to which the tech enables a good end-user experience. The printer anecdote is imperfect, but it is him highlighting a point he referred to many times in his career, which is that tech (and especially tech specs) is just a means to an end and people just by the end. Like how 3.x era Android phones often had more RAM or nominally higher clockspeed but were substantially less responsive to their contemporary iPhone competitors.

I do think he dodges the second question entirely, but the second question is, in so many words, "You suck at your job. Care to comment?" so, like, what is the ideal answer to that? Crucially, he correctly senses that many in the audience empathize with the aggressive tack taken by the questioner and he admits that it's a fair tack and he has no real defence. If someone tells me "you suck at your job", I think I'd be more likely to respond to validate their anger than to actually take it to be a factual claim in need of rebuttal. If anything I'm shocked that Jobs had the empathy to read that correctly.

I don't see it as RDF so much as it is an honest and coherent and adequate but imperfect answer.

OpenDoc was if I recall correctly, Apple's answer to Microsoft's OLE/ActiveX/Whatever-it's-called-now and from what I recall it was a superior technology. I believe the core premise was to allow documents to not so much be embedded in one another as to make the document central to the work, rather than the application and the various (application) tooling would become involved when needed.

I remember when I first made the switch to Mac around 2005 I did notice the experience of copy/paste between applications was inferior, but I didn't miss it that much.

Looking back, I guess that maintaining that level of app integration is a huge amount of work, and there was a huge amount of overhead in managing a doc that in fact is being edited by multiple docs. I don't think I ever thanked anybody for embedding a doc in another doc. I think compared to where we were turn of the century we expect a lot less from copy/paste and I don't think anybody really misses it.

Thinking about it now, from what I recall of Microsoft's "Longhorn", which was to become Vista it was trying to get this level of deep application integration to work was probably what set them behind and caused them to release a crocked OS and really put them on the back foot really until recently. I was just a kid at the time so I apologise to anybody more familiar with the story if I'm getting this all completely wrong.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that Steve was probably right about this in the end, and that developer made a fool of itself.

I worked on Longhorn. There were two things I remember that led to the delay:

- Trying to make every component of the OS describable in a manifest, such that you could change/update/remove it on the fly. They seem to have gotten there finally in Windows 10.

- Trying to rewrite all the native code in C#. Some components got there (including mine), but rewriting all of these libraries and applications at once made the OS so slow that we got to a point where it was unusable and had to take a partial reset.

No, RDF was a more intimate thing -- Steve's ability to tunnel into your brain through his eyes. No one was intense like Steve.

What he was trying to convey here was that you can have the best technology in the world, but if there's no purpose for it -- if people don't want it -- you have nothing.

OpenDoc and Newton, one of them a solution in search of a problem, and the other fifteen years ahead of its time, didn't seem like obvious winners to the former NeXT and current Pixar CEO. This shouldn't be a surprise.

One of the fatal faults of NeXT was that it was built around the basic concept of developing cool technology and trying to build a product around it. I think in that context, Jobs answered the question perfectly.

The only time they were making money was with WebObjects. They were onto something, but iTunes makes far more money than cool middleware

It's worth pointing out that the question was a pointed response to Job's first answer, where he was asked about Open Doc. Along the way, Jobs said the people complaining to the press hadn't done any meaningful work for the last 7 years.

It's not really a question you should answer IMO. Whether the complainers did significant work or not is independent of what Jobs did. It's just a dumb 'gotcha' question with no gotcha. If the questioner had a legitimate beef with Jobs' productivity he could have been specific. And Jobs was extremely clear in his original answer as to what he was doing - reviewing tech, and 'putting a bullet in the head' to tech that didn't fit the overarching goals of Apple.

He was not telling people platitudes over tech, or avoiding the question whatsoever. He was telling people his thinking process.

In essence is what real marketing is all about. That is not about finding how to sell something that they have but designing a strategy for the company to focus on creating what people need and are willing to pay that makes sense for the company.

That technology is secondary is something that(most) engineers just don't get, because they have never sold anything or created a company in the first place.

By the way he did not say that he was ignorant. He was not ignorant about anything his company did. He is saying that someone could know more about the tech but that what he actually cares about is how this tech is used, that is his job.

Of course the decision maker does not know all the details. He is not God. His job is to focus on the important details for the company to survive and prosper, not trying to look cool.

Here is a different take on it: "...But Jobs's response is a perfect demonstration of what to do in this situation."

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...

    He says he's completely ignorant about the technology.

That's not how I've always interpreted it. Seems more like he's admitting he's not an expert in it, in deference to the audience member who's clearly pretty invested in the technology.

     Despite the tech potentially being better and him not 
     knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the 
     messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make 
     some cool-looking demo"

Wasn't Jobs right? What was OpenDoc good for other than tech demos? Was there ever a killer app?

Document-based computing was intriguing, and in some ways it was of course a GUI extension of the Unix philosophy of chaining together multiple tools.

But how well did it ever work? How do you sell that?

Considering how badly companies struggle with GUIs to begin with, wouldn't we have compounded that by passing around these Frankenstein OpenDocs that were mashed together chunks of data that you had to use multiple bits of commercial software to manipulate? What if your fancy OpenDoc has 28 types of documents and the recipient only has 27 of the required viewers/editors installed? What about software version hell? What about document version hell? Maybe open and well-defined interchangeable data formats were the answer, but when has that ever worked out and why would software vendors even want to buy into that?

Ultimately, in some ways it would have been cool to email a Lotus 1-2-3 doc embedded in a Word doc mashed together with an AutoCAD file but what was this solving? It's at best slightly more elegant than just three separate files, and at worse a complete and utter nightmare.

Consensus seems to be that it was truly a solution without a problem, and at any rate not the kind of thing that would turn around a consumer-facing tech company.

    before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech".

Again, not how I interpreted it. Seemed to me he pretty blunt - he didn't see how OpenDoc could be productized. It wasn't solving anybody's problems, and even the biggest OpenDoc fan (do they exist?) would probably have to admit it seems like more of a backend or groupware foundation. Not a way to sell Macs.

    has completely forgotten the second question existed.

I'd say it was within his right to ignore a personal question. Especially since a lot of what he'd done during the years in question was quite public - NeXT, Pixar, etc. I support the first part of the guy's query, I guess, but it was rather graceful for Jobs to merely sidestep the question rather than address it more bluntly.

I am a huge fan of the idea of OpenDoc and component-based software in general, to the point that one of my side projects is writing a desktop environment in Common Lisp that is inspired by OpenDoc is not a clone; the emphasis is not on document embedding, but on increasing programmability and flexibility while maintaining a GUI environment. It would be kind of like a modern Lisp machine running on Linux. I was also inspired by a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373) about the Linux desktop could have benefitted from component-based software, where some of the commercial problems of OpenDoc would have been sidestepped by the wide availability of free, open source components instead of building FOSS analogues of large proprietary software packages.

But with that being said, I agree with you that OpenDoc would have been a tough sell in the proprietary software world for the reasons that you gave. There's also the fact that 1997-era Apple was in no position to challenge Microsoft head-on by promoting component software. In order for the Mac to survive, Apple needed the backing of large software developers like Microsoft and Adobe who were willing to continue writing Mac versions of their popular, industry-standard software packages. OpenDoc might have made business sense in the late 1980s or even in the early 1990s as an alternative to the growing Windows ecosystem, but by 1996 it was too late; Microsoft Windows was the clear winner in the marketplace by a long shot, and Apple was spiraling down the drain before Steve Jobs returned. That's why it was a very big deal at MacWorld Boston 1997 when Steve Jobs declared that "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over."

That's very fascinating. Good luck on your project! Convert some non-believers =)

It's a fascinating talk. I've uploaded a much better quality version to the Internet Archive (after Apple had it taken down from YouTube):

https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

Ahh that is much better, I'll update my link. Thanks :)

Why would they want it removed? It's free advertising.

Apple frequently takes down older videos for the same reason I assume they don't want old iPhone 6 videos floating around alongside iPhone 11 ads.

I've seen this many times, so great. Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today.

In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY

For what it's worth, I think Cook is a better CEO for the current era than Jobs would have been. He's not a strong public speaker, sure, but he's an operator who can execute on the vision Jobs laid out better than anyone.

On a personal level he's also a much more compassionate/empathetic person which I think plays well in the current social climate. I can't imagine Jobs getting away with some of his fabled antics today.

Finally, and probably due to the previous point, Cook is much more adept at playing the geopolitics game with India, China, Trump, etc..

But yes, him fielding random developer questions would be awkward at best. Which is why they shoo him off stage in favor of Craig/Sruji/some mid-level manager to talk tech every chance they get.

Is Cook more compassionate and empathetic? Or is he better at saying things to make him appear that way?

I ask that because I don't know. He does seem empathetic in his words. But the actions of Apple (from its production processes and sub-contracted systems to its treatment of developers and even iphone customers) seem as draconian and cut throat as they have ever been.

When I interned at Apple, every person from the mid-level upwards (who had been at Apple long enough) had a story of either being subjected to a negative experience at the hands of Jobs or else were party to one. Like... everyone. He was notoriously asshole-ish.

Cook does not have this reputation. Whether that's a persona or the real deal is impossible for us to say (I've never met him and I'm not at Apple anymore), but I think it's not very useful to think about what he's "really" like. We can only see how he presents himself, and so far his self-portrayal is significantly more positive than Jobs's, regardless of how the company is run at a larger scale.

---

I also think it's impossible to compare Jobs's ethics to Cook's ethics by looking at how Apple as a company operates. The company has grown immensely in the past decade, so I think 2020-Apple can't be compared to 2010-Apple in this way. However, we can maybe look at Apple's increased commitment to certain real-world ethical concerns and stipulate a little bit.

Environmentally, they're 100% powered by renewable energy, and they recently announced they want to be 100% carbon-neutral by 2030. They have also said they want to manufacture new iPhones entirely from old iPhones, which would be great.

They're also a leader in consumer privacy and security, more than any other company of a similar size.

Then there's the manufacturing stuff. They certainly benefit from and make use of unethical manufacturing processes, but they seem to be trying to move away from that (to the extent that a company that requires as much manufacturing as they do can). I believe their chips are manufactured in the US (?), and I think they've started trying to manufacture certain other things in the US (I think the Mac Pro? or is that done with? I haven't checked in on it recently). Of course, they've got plenty of room to grow when it comes to ethical manufacturing, but what I'm highlighting here is that they've made some effort to improve as new issues have come to light, which can't be said of all companies with their manufacturing needs.

All that said, Apple as a company has plenty of room for growth in the ethical sense, but we can at least appreciate that these are issues that they address explicitly compared to the Apple of the past. As far as I'm aware, this has all been done under Cook's leadership, so perhaps it reflects on his personal values to some extent.

>Environmentally

Bah. Apple makes a product like Airpod which is disposable and impossible to recycle. They design their products to be impossible to repair, and actually sabotage 3rd party repair efforts. Apple does not care about the environment at all. If they did, they would try to keep them out of landfills, make them easy to repair and recycle, and not design them to fail.

How those two were as 'personalities' may not have been important, and probably neither are the 'powered by renewable energy' efforts.

The former just doesn't matter that much and the later is just marketing.

What is material is their ability to make great things, delight customers, operate effectively etc..

Organizations are often led by complimentary types, Jobs is a classic Alpha, Cook a classic Beta, they happened to work well together. But Job's assertiveness, far from being a 'negative thing' may have been a quite essential spark in the formation of the company. Just because it doesn't make you 'feel good' doesn't mean it's bad for the creative process or the company. It also may have been irrelevant: it's entirely possible jobs may have been able to be jobs without that.

Apple is an IP company, their commitment to '0 carbon' is not really important compared to a chemical company, an oil refinery, or some entity whereupon operations are material contributors to carbon.

It's a nice thing to do, and it makes for good corporate citizenry, but it's mostly just that.

I think the main difference is that Jobs would lose his temper and scream at people while Cook is more of the quiet, unflappable type.

Tim Cook is arguably the greatest managerial operator of our times. Without him apple wouldn’t have been able to scale and refine their businesses processes like they needed to reach the $1T mark.

However, I believe it was Jobs who was the catalyst for the entire show. He was the spark that the rocket needed.

The company is in an incredible financial position but is still vulnerable to the next big innovation. The next usurper. The next Black Swan.

Jobs would be so antsy to have something new out at this point. And if he had a vision for something- which I think he would have Had- he would have made it happen.

Maybe some next great thing will happen for Apple soon? The device that cannibalizes the iPhone like the iPhone did to iPod.

Very true. I think Apple's got another 10 years or so until they face this dilemma, so time will tell. Their commitment to data privacy really put them at a disadvantage in the AI race, but have made great strides with federated learning.

And you can see them getting a little scared of this coming doom with their commitment to the App store monopolistic practices (whether you believe it's wrong or not, they really can't afford to cave on this front for their long-term sake)

Tim's obviously brought financial success, but where's Steve's user experience vision going?

After Steve passed in '11, it seems his idea pipe got drained. The watch came out in '15, the earbuds in '16 (neither earth shaking) and other than that, it's been small iterations on the same products for 10 years. Where's the new excitement?

Apple Watch and Airpods are a larger part of Apple's business than Macintosh.

Isn’t everything bigger than Macintosh?

I’m almost surprised they are even bothering to continue the line and just don’t shove the dev work out to Microsoft. Especially since they have been de-thanged, Windows is no threat at all to Apple’s market.

Yep, I definitely believe Jobs would have released a robot, a hologram machine, a magical glove tactile input device, a roomscale collaboration platform, or just something, anything besides 100 different variations of the iPhone and iPad.

I may be in the minority, but if the Apple Watch had a camera, I would leave my phone at home.

But then I'm not one of those guys always staring at their phone/watch.

What's the opposite of power user? Old guy, I guess.

Yeah, I'd say the next great thing is coming: Apple "simulated reality" AR glasses... I'm totally speculating, but I think a lot of their recent innovations have been pushing in this direction, and I think they have filed patents exactly along those lines as well IIRC.

>On a personal level he's also a much more compassionate/ empathetic person

I really dont see any of that. Definitely not to its customers or professional users and developers. If anything I think these compassionate and empathetic note, the so called "enrich" people's live is a recent thing in the past 4-5 years.

And personally I have not problem with that statement, except until you get caught not doing so people will judge you as a hypocrite. And it is exactly the same playbook as Google's do no evil. That is why Steve Jobs never talks much about any of that ( Despite I think he deeply cares about it ) and only talks about building GREAT products for their customers.

Steve cares or doesn't cares. You can tell. And he is being true to himself. Not the same could be said to Cook. I guess that is partly why Tim is an operational person and not a product person.

We'll never know, but I think someone with Jobs' social skills would know what he could get away with in 2020, and adjust accordingly.

I think some of the "fabled antics" are necessary for success. Tim Cook simply continue on what's already been built and would have to be really bad to really fail in that period of time.

In my opinion executive skills are of course needed but so are long term high level vision, with strong opinions like sjobs had - even if that makes them "less liked"

That all having been said, I am curious how Steve Jobs would have handled the recent congressional hearings.

He would have owned it, and deployed the Reality Distortion Field on Congress.

> he's an operator who can execute on the vision Jobs laid out better than anyone

I think Jobs's vision was not static though.

When I watch these confs and compare to today I see an empty pattern. Something's missing.

ps: by that I mean, the show goes on but the soil is dry, I don't think the world dreams or needs more digital tech. It's ironically in autopilot.

What's happened is a very, very weird thing. Our 'capabilities' with computers have gone parabolic, but our personal 'possibilities' have not.

The next great technology revolution will give people (developers and consumers) the ability to imagine new possibilities. Some would say that requires new hardware embodiments (AR/VR), while others would say it's a merely a psychological change from the folks who build today (FB/Google repenting).

That's true, we're the bottleneck now.. and also society got the brakes off on the web. Computing is now a double edged sword instead of a fun tool.

I'm not sure AR/VR will make a big diff but time will tell.

On the AR/VR note, does anyone know offhand if there's any decent "hacker friendly" AR and/or VR hardware out there? And by "hacker friendly" I mean "you can develop for the platform without having to buy some expensive / proprietary toolchain and SDK and need permission from the hardware vendor to load apps". Even better would be if the device firmware itself were F/OSS, but I realize that might be asking too much...

Relativity was shared on HN a while ago. I can't speak to the quality of the hardware as I haven't tried it, but it fits your requirements, partially. For various reasons (and please correct me if I'm wrong) all VR compositors are tied directly to a store/platform because everyone has an appstore in 2020. wxrc (Wayland VR compositors) is in development but it looks like it's not quite ready for wide usage. That means PCVR is still mostly directly tied to Steam and standalone VR is mostly tied to Facebook...

There should be a betting pool for the month and year the first VR pop-up ad scares someone to death.

I am far less technically inclined than most on HN. I find the premise of AR to be very exciting, but only if I am - as a nontechnical user - provided with tools for solving my own problems and augmenting my life experience as I see fit rather than merely consuming a series of curated experiences.

At the more extreme end, Keiichi Matsuda's "Hyperreality"* absolutely is a nightmare. It's not even the intensification of media that I find so abhorrent. It's the coercion and lack of user agency.

*https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

Bret Victor has captured this really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

Dynamicland is the best form of 'AR' right now. Apple is taking a note via App Clips and the physical version of that - whatever they call it.

Yeah upon a cursory evaluation, almost everything we have today was possible 20 years ago -- the software possibilities have barely changed. We read web pages, send messages, play games, edit photos and post them online. There are a couple things that weren't around, like high-fidelity VR, smartwatches, or always-online cars, but otherwise, the ways we interact with and use technology day-to-day have not really changed. I thought things would be a lot different by now, compared to what I imagined when I was first dabbling on the internet in the 90's.

Maybe we just already figured out what works well. For example I interact with my kitchen sink in almost exactly the same way as someone 3 generations ago. It works fine, so why change it.

Tech as it stands today requires a cognitive overhead that I think is wearing down people. It seems like we can make more complex software but we can't make it work smoothly. People are spending far too much time searching the web for tech workarounds and contacting support teams. Tech, when done right, should be unnoticed in the background of people's minds. It's anything but that right now.

I'd argue that today's challenge is making powerful, complex software that is easy to use or accessible. The software industry, in general, makes customers pay for the developers' laziness in design and implementation. Every modal/alert you have to read, every choice you have to make, was something that could probably have been designed out of the user flow. Technology is complicated because companies/vendors choose for it to be -- generally they will invest just as much energy/money as they have to do ship something that checks off the bullet points and brings enough ROI to please the shareholders.

There's no single culprit, but you hit part of the problem.

- Users prioritizing new features over rock solid performance hurt us badly. Basically, we as customers are our own worst enemy.

- Software done as distributed services when it doesn't need to be. Each tier added to a distributed architecture is a point of failure. And each tier needs to be supported in vendor upgrades and the like for server software, VM software, security patches, etc.

- Reduced emphasis on protocols. When my team started to develop services for the first time we decided to use JSON as the lingua franca for communicating between them. But we didn't think about developing protocols using JSON. Now it's a shit show of different messaging formats in JSON. So we don't have any standard components for parsing and forming messages.

- Here's a particular pain point with me. I'm sick of creating an account for every damned service I use. When I pull up an app to order takeout from a restaurant, I shouldn't need an account. All too often, I'm required to create one. I have accounts all over the web now and I'm sure I don't remember half of them. Of course, having lots of accounts requires lots of passwords to manage. So I have a password manager which works mostly until I'm in a hurry and then it doesn't.

I don't see a way out of our current predicament. But I do hear an undercurrent of "I want to simplify my life" growing. I believe that tech is taking too much cognitive effort from non-tech people.

Oh yeah, regarding creating accounts, I had a recent situation where I wanted to make a reservation at a restaurant and the system they used required creating an account to do so. I disagreed with this so I phone them to make the reservation. After the call I actually got an email confirming my reservation, without me having given my email address! Their reservation system (Resy) had created an account for me! The only way I can think they got an email is from me having made a reservation with that restaurant in the past with a different reservation system and the restaurant took it upon themselves to populate that info in the new system, which then created an account for me. Needless to say I was a little frustrated that an account was created on a foreign-owned 3rd party service that I didn't agree to (and the whole reason I had called in the first place)...

Anyway, bit of a rant there but it's another symptom of software essentially disrespecting the user/customer and making them "pay" for the choices of product design.

Regarding cognitive effort, I talk about this with people on a pretty much constant basis. My feedback to designers and product people is always about how much cognitive energy I have to consume to interact with this feature/app/etc. We live in a time where our cognitive capacity is constantly sapped by exactly the things we're discussing in this thread. Extraneous notifications, software update reminders, "dark pattern" UX on news websites, animated advertisements, inconsistent/unintuitive design patterns across different software/platforms, low batteries (or other tech problems), etc.

Every bit of effort we can make on the creators' side to make the user's life easier is a 100% worthy undertaking, IMO. Not only is it a good thing to do for our fellow humans, they will recognize the ease of use and be a happy user or customer as a result.

> Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today.

Sure. Developers today would ask him about AppStore policies and things like that. No one would ask technical questions as it wouldn't make sense. And I am quite sure this scene will only ever exist in my imagination. :)

And again, there's a powerful way to communicate vision fielding the hard questions about the App Store - they are perfect opportunities to build a strong community, buying into a shared future.

Most people only see App Store fees as a tax -- in some cases it really looks like that, but in the bigger picture, it's a beautiful example of values codified in a business model.

That’s a great way to see it!

I could see technical questions being asked about Apple Silicon, and other hardware considerations

Craig Federighi gets asked those once in a while.

I think it is ultra hard to really convey the vision for what you're doing, what you did, and where you're going to really put developer decisions in context.

It's super easy to declare whatever executive to be some evil guy because he shot your product down because he killed your framework or whatever.

But sometimes these things are painful, but are done for the 'right' reasons.

Steve was able to communicate those things, I think most folks can't and thus don't.

And yet 20 years later, even when people watch the video they still dont get it.

God I wish this man is still alive, Apple would be so much better now.

Its vision. He knows what fits in his vision, and he knows what doesn't and can name the reasons why not and what it would take to make it work. At the same time he can on the spot explain it, and if nothing else at least the listener understands the reasons, and not just the decision. Its crazy refreshing in the midst of soundbites and technology which doesn't serve the end user.

Frankly, I think he nails it all in the first couple minutes. He's the chief NAK'er. Being able to say "no" is more important than yes. Yet so many people are afraid of hurting people's feelings or don't have the political will to do it. Although at that point in his career it had already bitten him once at apple.

Also, can you imagine a current apple employee publicly disparaging one of their products like Jobs did the Newton and various other things? Take the watch, he might have loved it, but I can totally hear him complaining about how it was a subpar experience to the iphone, which you have in your pocket, cue the speech recognition bit. Also the thinly veiled bits about if the clone hardware were actually better..

I think Steve would have sounded like a broken record, much like Ive has been. New times require new people, and some people at Apple should REALLY be replaced by fresher ones.

I doubt Steve/Ive would have let the new widget and icon customisation in iOS14 see the light of day, but it is a MASSIVE hit in a younger demographic.

You nailed it w/ your comment about how different today's most common public forums w/ leaders are run.

I also enjoy how, in that Q&A session, he lays out a ton of what Apple would actually release in the subsequent decade.

Clickable link for the site you mentioned: https://allaboutstevejobs.com/

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