Two perspectives on a designer who Steve Jobs could not hire
arun.is
arun.is
P.S. I somewhat agree with the commentator saying that hacker news is in many ways a sort of venture capital pornography, but I think the people comparing jobs to historical figures that confronted adolf hitler or changed the course of human history need some very long and deep self reflection.
Jobs, Churchill, Gates, Musk - I don’t understand. It’s as if proponents of that view believe that the only people deserving of recognition are those that were completely internally consistent, including by the times in which they are being judged (ie present tense).
Humans are complex. None of us (or at least, very very few of us) are fully internally consistent. The personality flaws that cause the greatest consternation may also be those that lead to our greatest triumphs. If they are not criminal, why not recognise people for doing great things? And why is it so hard to say add the caveat that like all humans, they had their flaws?
They're saying that we shouldn't just talk about all the positive things that Jobs did as if he was some kind of paragon - the history books should also talk about the bad.
So he was an ass to work with... That doesn't void anything else that was done, nor should it be a highlight. Worth mentioning, sure.
Visionaries are usually hard to deal with (perhaps because they are fighting against the grain). Most visionaries are wrong, but that diversity is what pushes us forward.
iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.
[1]: if not earlier. randomly skimming wikipedia finds e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices
I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward.
Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas.
It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.
What it did have was a much bigger and better touchscreen that didn't need a stylus. (Even that wasn't really a technical innovation per se - rather it was the willingness to charge over twice as much as previous phones that made it possible).
That, and many people were glad to have plastic screens - iPhones shattering because you looked at them too enthusiastically was a source of many lols and many expensive repairs / re-purchases. The early iPhones still scratched nearly as easily (keys or sand were more than sufficient), but they were nowhere near as durable overall. Decent screen durability, screen protectors, and protective cases took years to arrive - the gorilla glass of the time was far, far more fragile than it is now.
Android at the time was similarly awful. I remember talking to an android engineer at Google a few years later. I was asking him why android’s UI still sucked compared to iPhones. He said android was the only mobile operating system still standing which was invented before the iPhone. They had to essentially piece by piece reinvent the whole core OS to make it relevant after the iPhone came out. That was taking longer than they would like - because of course it was. But to their credit, they got there.
Google at the time was working in the same hardware ecosystem as Apple and they didn’t invent the iPhone. And that’s not criticism - the design of the iPhone is only obvious in hindsight. If Apple didn’t do it, who knows what our phones would look like today. Probably much worse.
The touch screen keyboard, swipe to unlock, rich fonts, full multitasking & app switching. This was all revolutionary at the time. Steve jobs was an arse. But he (and his team) pulled off a revolution with the iPhone. He deserves credit for that.
And Android also runs Java. It being a full Java rather than the weird inconsistent nonsense that was J2ME is heavily due to significant compute improvements - in that sense, Android was merely ahead of the curve, and made some good architectural choices to make it perform well.
So yeah, I think the powerful personal phone revolution was inevitable. They might not look like iphones, but they would absolutely look better than Windows CE before they hit a billion users.
Plus, really. Look at Palm OS. Look at iPhones. There's not a huge UX conceptual leap there - it's much more in the premium hardware, and later in the unified app store, proving that the market for mid-high-price good devices existed (more expensive WinCE devices already had a small but consistent market. Pro/consumer-grade was inevitable). And I think there's room to argue that we'd be better off without the app store monopolies that resulted, so that could go either way (though I fully grant the massively superior user experience at the time).
Even all these years later it's still basically impossible to make a Java application that runs on mobile and desktop (it's technically possible with Gluon but I've never seen it in the wild).
At best the shift allowed you to reuse libraries .. which is not a small win, but seems like a fraction of whats possible
I'm not deep in the Java mines so maybe I've missed some big picture issues around convergence - and why it wasn't even attempted. Would be curious to hear from the gurus :)
So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before.
So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.
I think it's understandable given how under-powered the devices were - but the end was sort of inevitable
I liked Nokias, I even programmed for Symbian OS, but boy, that was one convoluted system. The UI was pure hell, badly documented, error-prone and had to be tailored to every device out there (of which Nokia churned out a lot), unless you wanted to risk bad artifacts.
They also LOVED to introduce major compatibility breaks.
Still, the iphone did everything so luch better that I switched.
Steve Jobs?
This is going to need a fair amount of substantiation, because those are some wild claims.
Steve Jobs may not have invented the personal computer, smartphone, or computer-generated animated movies, but he definitely popularized all of them
None of those things were invented by him, or by the companies he worked with. They were mass-marketed by him.
Personally I tend to side more with rms's position on the passing of Steve Jobs.
I just wonder how credulous someone needs to be in order to assert that guy ".. completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times."
Perhaps if I'd ever owned or used any Apple products, I may have bought into these grand claims. Alas my ICT history has been Commodore, PC-compat, Palm, Nokia, GNU/Linux, begrudgingly Microsoft, and Google products, etc.
EDIT:
From the link you shared:
"Jobs later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple"."
"According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the $5,000 paid out), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350."
Wozniak was / is a legend. Steve Jobs was persistently awful.
>Steve Jobs was persistently awful.
I don't think the first statement supports the second, he did give some credit there. I think often awful.
although where awful is concerned, was he worse than a lot of powerful people. We have a lot of awful people to look at, where does Jobs fall on the scale, because when I look at Jobs he doesn't look anywhere as bad as Harvey Weinstein. Lots of people who frequent HN probably went around thinking Bill Gates was much worse than Steve Jobs, is he still or is Jobs the worse one now?
As to a leader-board of awfulness - we may be missing the point there. Sure, yes, lots of powerful people are awful, but one doesn't excuse the other.
I suspect for a lot of free software advocates, idealists if you will, it's hard (and more importantly, pointless) to try to measure who was the most awful person in terms of compromising people's freedoms.
not sure if I understand you here - you're not suggesting he annexed the credit - he quite clearly shared it or in that quote almost gave it entirely away.
>Sure, yes, lots of powerful people are awful, but one doesn't excuse the other.
yeah I don't know if most people, given the power, won't be awful some times. Also I'm not sure if almost all people are not awful sometimes, if given the right pressure.
So when someone is complaining about the awfulness of any one person I guess I actually want more than anecdotes of how rude they were, considering how awful people can be. (That money thing is one but well, I've also noticed people when they don't have money will sometimes be untrustworthy about it)
The absence of any technical brilliance is fairly well documented, and Woz was the first, possibly most famous, person he leveraged / misled (depending how charitable you want to be).
So, yes, I am saying he annexed the credit. The quote that we're talking about - musing on how there wouldn't have been an Apple without Woz - was from a 2011 book, where he looks back, from his multi-billionaire perspective, at someone he shafted repeatedly some decades earlier. Who knows the tone of this comment - to me it doesn't feel like a '...and I feel bad about it' type comment, just a casual aside.
Mind, Woz was just one of many casualties along the way, too.
> So when someone is complaining about the awfulness of any one person I guess I actually want more than anecdotes of how rude they were, considering how awful people can be.
The stories of Jobs' awfulness are many and manifest. Start with a web search on 'stories of steve jobs being awful', or go straight to Lisa Brennan-Jobs' book. Arguably every story about someone is by definition an anecdote, so perhaps this won't be enough for you.
In any case, the guy certainly did NOT 'completely transform modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times', seemed to have no notable skills beyond showmanship, and was awful.
"Alvy Ray Smith helped invent computer animation as we know it—then got royally shafted by Steve Jobs"
The article paints Jobs, in much more detail than the byline above, as an extremely toxic personality.
While there are plenty of stories about his abusive behavior (usually to his staff) especially in his younger days, there are equally plenty of positive anecdotes about him as a human. Personally I don't think I would have enjoyed working for him, but I feel it would have been an experience I would have not regretted. Like all of us, he was flawed in some areas, good in others.
That's some real hyperbole. We had phones and pc's already, it wouldn't of transformed our lives or changed our trajectory but yes he has been influential in shaping what that looks llike A cosmetic impact sure.
I am starting to wonder if this is a tech thing. Because if you talk to people in many other industry, you will have a high chances of seeing / meeting one.
And there are plenty of people who worked with him have no problem what so ever. And all of them are ones that are willing to stand up for themselves and talk back to Steve.
I mean, by the age of late 30 one should realise most of the work we have today are really really shit. This may not be apparent in tech. But it is commonly the case everywhere else. Trying to push for higher quality and inertia will absolutely drive a person insane.
History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.
Yes wealth inequality is probably one of the biggest issues of our generation. Yes it is probably unethical that people are able to amass such huge fortunes particularly in some examples less reflective of the current crop of tech billionaires through tax loopholes and the fact that if you have money its easier to get more money. Yes musk is a billionaire but almost all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that? Also, why is the meme that if we still have world hunger we shouldn’t have a space program back again? As though the world isn’t large enough for us collectively to pursue more than one avenue of progress at once.
On top of that is that the billionaires are using their money to fly to space, instead of really changing the world for better, which they clearly good do. At the same time there is a significant portion of our community that idiolises these people and acts as if they are in fact changing the world for better.
are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question? i was under the impression that they were sinking their time and money into them too, as more of a hobby than a money-maker
They aren't. We have currently two billionaire hobby space programs. One is a pure hobby and doesn't do actual space yet (suborbital hops != orbit). The other one exists solely to open Mars for regular access and eventual colonization, in the process also opening up near-Earth space for general exploration and exploitation. If it succeeds, it'll create an unprecedented amount of lasting value for humanity in general.
Really, complaining about billionaire space is one of the dumbest part of the current zeitgeist.
The other company I reference have not made a commercially viable rocket that will get you into orbit.
> largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires
Which means that you are saying that Musk is getting taxpayer money from SpaceX. This clearly isn't the case, he's sinking his own money into it too
Well, yes, they're a real company providing real services and getting paid in exchange.
Anyway, whether the contracts are private or government is off-topic (if it was, I'd point out that the government is getting a really good deal here, which is a very rare case in large-scale government spending). The point is, all that money isn't being funneled to line Musk's pockets, it's being reinvested straight into "let's go to Mars" R&D program.
Something that was tried in Sweden in the eighties was Employee Funds [0]. In short, tax the companies and use the money to buy stock in the same. Put the stock in funds controlled by the employees, which, in practice meant the unions. I think the original proposal was meant as a way to softly introduce a true socialist society, where the means of production (the capital) eventually would be completely owned by the workers.
The funds were never particularly popular outside the big labour union. Even the ruling Social Democrats that implemented the solution did it reluctantly after pressure from the unions. The funds was scrapped in the early nineties.
I would be pretty pissed if my compensation was being tied up in the risk of 1 company like that.
So far the least corrupt method is a low cost broad market index fund. There are fewer people in the chain of decision making, hence less agency risk. Passive index funds do the job better than human investors with lower probabilities of corruption.
Anyway, I’m not arguing for the solution. I just brought it up as I think it’s an interesting historical footnote. Even the finance minister of the ruling party that introduced them famously wrote a poem that goes something like (in fine translation by google)
The wage earners' funds are fucking crap,
now we've dumped them all the way here.
Then they should be filled with every union bigwig
who supported us so strongly in our struggle.
Now we do not have to go more rounds,
until the whole of Sweden is full of funds.
Then again, pretty often the bad stuff is what influenced history a lot. And it is simply not true that all the bad stuff was just because back then the poor thing of person did not knew better. Pretty often, the same person being celebrated was the driver of the "bad stuff" , not merely follower acting like everyone else.
And yet again, bad stuff often is what made achievement and victories possible. So then, people who made more ethical decisions did not earned as much. That deserves recognition too.
There are probably tens of millions of people and ten thousand MIT graduates who love and study physics more because of Walter Lewin. Does that justify the ways that he was abusive or morally ambiguous? Hell no!
Despite the controversy and very public cancellation of Prof. Lewin, his lectures are my top recommendation for studying introductory physics.
You say this mockingly, as if being a slave owner should not overshadow everything else you do in life.
Yes, it should. It absolutely should. Being a slave-owner is massively, grotesquely evil. It should be what you are remembered and rightly denounced for.
> Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions!
Considering slave-owning to be morally wrong is not a modern invention. It was considered wrong at the time too, just not by those who were profiting off it.
For instance, I don't think you'd find many slave who did not think it was evil.
Even among just the founders, slavery wasn't an institution universally accepted even in Washington's day.
Yes.
Then man kept other humans as slaves. That is evil. There is no question about this. People in his own time thought this was evil. He did it anyway. He was evil.
I'm not so sure. For example, I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life.
Then you probably should be reading about his work in a science text book rather than a history book. For history books, the background and context of the people and events is as important as the events themselves.
How Steve Jobs treated his daughter, for example, is between him and his family. Diminishing his business accomplishments because of that is simply small-minded.
If I should respect someone's opinion or success in life, well that respect needs to come from someplace. And in my eyes its just harder to earn it compared to your viewpoint - excellence in 1 singular aspect isn't cutting it.
There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. The others, not so much.
Or they've just managed to successfully hide their feet of clay, or you've just decided that you like their awesomeness so much you're going to overlook their peccadilloes.
Name any accomplished person, and you'll find haters.
Huge impacts are complicated, but being a good person is something I expect of everyone. If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.
Jobs hasn't benefited me much in any significant way. I've never been an Apple fanboy, never worked for Apple, never got rich off Apple stock, don't care much for Toy Story. I have an Apple mini, but used it only for porting D to it.
But I enjoy real life rags-to-riches stories, and Jobs is one of them.
> If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.
When Jobs passed, he left behind a lot of people who loved him (I'm not talking about fanboys, but people who were his friends and family.)
I recently attended the memorial of a close friend who died. Nearly a hundred people showed up, all trading stories about him. He left behind quite a lot of people who loved him, too.
Surely not everyone has to join them, or?
Jobs yelled at people, fired them, and apparently worse? I don't know all the specifics, but...
Of those he yelled at, how many conversations, without yelling, were had first? How many were had one on one first, but he was ignored?
How many pleasant, amicable conversations were had. What's the ratio?
To hear some talk, apparently Jobs was walking around Apple HQ, just randomly screaming at, and belittling others, all day long?!
This seems inaccurate.
And the 'style of the time' is critical, as parent says. You cannot judge a person's leadership style by today's standards, that's absurd, instead, how would Jobs be rated against the average manager/boss of the time?
In the 80s, I had many a manager/boss which would be know to yell and belittle people. People would also crack racist jokes, make fun of alternate life styles, and in many cases only doing it to fit in, not really even caring or thinking wrong of it.
History must be viewed as a contemporary would.
More importantly, humans are different. Some are heads and shoulders above others morally or in other ways, and judge them accordingly.
> There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and if this fear speaks in terms of "casting the first stone," it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We're all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
> why not recognise people for doing great things?
In this case, because they can't be called "great things" without diminishing human greatness and actually greats -- they're just product, often in the service of selfish, banal, mediocre ends. Certainly with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. None of their luminaries can even tie the laces of people who can tie the laces of great people. So why can't the money be enough, why do we need to fawn over people, too?
There's plenty of people who are remembered in history but just not lauded for their actions. All the commenter is advocating is for a better understanding of historical figures.
The main problem with Jobs is that he developed a cult following that (at least in my opinion) was never deserved. Gates never developed this, and has rightly been criticized for his practices at Microsoft, while still being praised for his charity work in later years. Musk arguably has a similar cult following, and to add to that, I know very little about him, so maybe of three you listed, Musk is the most fair comparison.
Ah, I have completely missed this particular controversy. I was been wondering if this was really a debate about cancel culture. In that sense, I hear you. I'm vehemently anti-cancel culture, and I don't particularly care if some prominent historical figure had the "wrong" views.
One of them was an asshole. The other one was... a white supremacist to say the least.
"Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job." [0]
Steve Jobs made a shitload of money growing a tech company. The broad overview of his career involving him being there when it went from nothing to something, leaving, succeeding while it floundered, then returning to have it then also succeed; gives him more credibility for having caused that success than many other potential role models have.
> I was contacted by the people who became Pixar–I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn’t fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve’s best hour.
It may be, but that’s not who posts on it and determines the content.
I get goosebumps thinking about his life and watching some of the old clips on YT.
https://www.facebook.com/SteveJobsFeed/posts/john-carmack-re...
Sorry about the facebook link
So what? Many celebrated people (artists, scientists, architects, leaders) were actually quite miserable people to be around and work with.
Pretty ironic that your complaining about Steve Jobs in the comment section of an article that has almost nothing to do with him.
Fyi... in case the gp's top-voted comment gives a misleading impression about this thread's article content...
This blog post is actually about designer Richard Sapper who did work for IBM. (E.g. the IBM ThinkPad black aesthetics.)
The "2 perspectives" of Richard Sapper are: (1) the 1983 video documentary on youtube, and (2) a recent 2016 book showing a portfolio of his work
I totally understand gp's advice to not celebrate Steve Job's human flaws but based on the text's actual content (Richard Sapper), the SJ complaint is really a non-sequitur in this thread. The author is just name-dropping SJ in the headline and in one sentence to hook the reader into reading more about Richard Sapper.
I don't know what gets you so mad at him, maybe you were the guy he fired from his meeting? Or is it just jealousy and denial of truth. He is not a moral saint, nor are you. He sometimes gets angry and attacks people, so did you in your post. Judging from how biased you were in your post, you are in no position to judge him to be honest, let alone belittling his massive contributions to mankind. Where were you when he introduced iPhone to the world?
http://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/index.html
> How the Connection Machine inspired Steve Jobs:
My old friend Joanna Hoffman was marketing manager for the first Macintosh and the NeXT computer, and Steve Jobs' "right hand," as depicted by Kate Winslet in the film "Steve Jobs." In 1986, when the Connection Machine came out, Jobs asked her to get its designer to create his new NeXT computer as well. To which Joanna replied, "Too late, Tamiko has gone to Europe to become an artist!" But the machine made a lasting impression on him, and from that point on, Jobs' designs were not merely useful - they were visually sublime.
See "CM-1/CM-2 Design Legacy" >>
They say you should never meet your heroes. Working with these people likely would have pushed them into his “shithead” category.
In the iPhone or iMac, what's on the screen is what is important. Nothing else is important, so it's not there. One of Rams' principles: "Good design is as little design as possible."
Contrast that to a competing product like the ASUS ROG Phone: RGB lights, not-strictly-necessary cosmetic vents, asymmetrical lines, printed design patterns. Now THAT is a product that would make Dieter Rams throw up in his mouth!
I actually agree wholeheartedly. Apple's devices are the apex of form following function, which is why their form advances so rarely: the functionality of the iPhone changes so little from year-to-year, that Apple doesn't really need to re-engineer much. Hell, the iPhone 12 is just a redux of the iPhone 5 footprint, an anachronism that's yet another great example of form meandering while function stagnates. The deficiencies in our current devices are clear: they're centralized, non-extensible, and exceptionally difficult to fix when they break. Apple profits off all three of those markets, so I have little faith that they intend to change anything there soon.
> Contrast that to a competing product like the ASUS ROG Phone
Don't make me (or Tim Cook, for that matter) laugh. The iPhone doesn't compete with the ROG Phone: they're ostentatiously different products. One is a gaming phone, the other is an iPhone. You're comparing a dune-buggy to a Ford Fiesta, which you're welcome to do, but will sway very few of their respective audiences.
None of these are household names.
https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido
To summarize:
* Having THE language creator (dropbox was majority Python) around is super useful, especially from a soft-technical standpoint. Imagine the confidence boost a junior gets from that.
* Worked on mypy
Even today, I hope Apple makes a switch to their own patched version of the Linux kernel. It would be a great breath of new air into macOS. In terms of sheer features and compatibility, the Linux kernel surpasses Darwin by massive measures.
And at that time (late 90s) the Linux kernel was certainly awesome but not clearly that much more awesome than BSD. The amount of driver and architecture support in the kernel wasn't as expansive as now.
Richard Sapper, while responsible for the overall design of the ThinkPad line, did not invent or design that keyboard. The honor of the original idea goes to John Karidis, and credit is also due to other IBM designers who helped refine the design.
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2017/10/16/meet-th...
Do we attribute the Mona Lisa to Da Vinci or his client?
I wonder how people went about this one with the 2x2 picture matrix.
1 2
3 4
But here it's clockwise
1 2
4 3
2 3
1 4
Bauhaus are famous for "Form follows function."
Richard creates:
"When the Thinkpad is closed, it looks like a simple black slab. When opened, a cam at the hinge theatrically rearranges two keyboard halves to extend out of the computer. There are numerous colorful accents, including an IBM logo in red, green, and blue, and of course, the red Trackpoint."
... theatrically ...
"The PowerBook, on the other hand, aims to be as simple as possible in whatever state."
... that's Bauhaus: simple.
I like the stinkies' keyboard, but it is quite daft. His engineer creds are a bit underwhelming. Exploding coffee pots are pretty silly in a world that has had the pressure cooker, kettles and the steam engine for centuries/millennia.
Also, I'd observe that a "spiritual successor" to something might have some significant differences?
Anyway, I liked the folding Thinkpad keyboard. If it had been a flimsy malfunctioning attempt at getting attention, it would have been different. But it was very solid, wasn't it?
Anyway, the Bauhaus in the article is the design house and not the band.
I know, that's the point; I'm saying that the original criticism was too simplistic.
Are there any examples, where a worthy achievement was made by a nice, agreeable, likeable person?
Each achiever story I recall, is accompanied by how asshole the person is/was, to a set of folks.