Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth

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108 pointsperitpatrio23 comments

You can't blame the audience for believing the eureka myth when new designs and new features are revealed in an instant, on stage, often punctuated with a brief utterance of boom.

Steve makes it look easy.

Arguably, it's not dissimilar to the techniques of showmanship that a magician uses. Months and years are spent perfecting their stage performances so that when you finally show an audience, they don't see the ropes and pulleys -- they see the trick.

Perhaps it's part of Steve Jobs' strategy to make everything seem so effortless and inspired, as a way to frustrate and flummox his competitors when inspiration inevitably fails to strike them on cue.

People like the Eureka myth it's sexy, and people like the idea of being able to achieve great things effortlessly because if someone else can do it so can I.

It's the entire reason get rich quick scheme exist. Then again if it was that easy we wouldn't be in a recession.

See also products seemingly appearing in stores.

This is more pronounced with Mac/iPod announcements. Steve will announce the new product and the kicker is that it's available "today in Apple Stores." That's one hell of a trick.

Does anyone have a good ref for the details of "internal competition"? The organizational architecture would be fascinating.

Yeah, this article is mostly bluster. There's no special "internal competition" where 10 teams line up at tribal council and Jobs snuffs out their torches one by one. Organizational structure is very mundane, honestly. There's the kernel team, the CoreOS team, Frameworks, iApps, Pro Apps, the Image and Media Group (affectionately known as IMG), Safari, Developer Tools, Server (now merged with Dev Tools), and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting.

Look, the Eureka myth is a myth as this article rightly points out. But the "just work harder and you'll succeed" myth that it embraces is, likewise, a myth. The key to Apple's success is as old as humankind itself. Jobs is just continuing the same tradition that started when the first monkey looked at his seed-eating chump friends, then down at the rock in his hands, and then decided "screw the nuts and berries, I'm going to go kill me a wildebeest!"

That first monkey probably died. Jobs's first company called Apple effectively died. His second company, originally called NeXT, nearly died. It's a wild stroke of luck that he was able to merge the two corpses and finally succeed.

Having worked at Apple, and now at a more "normal" company, I've seen both sides of the same story. It goes like this...

CEO: We need a hit!

MARKETING MANAGER #1: I have an idea!

CEO: Do you think it can make money?

MARKETING MANAGER #1: Yes.

MARKETING MANAGER #2: Wait, I also have an idea!

ENGINEER #3: I have an idea.

CEO: Wait, there's a professional speaking. Mr. Marketing Manager, can your idea make money?

MARKETING MANAGER #2: Sure.

MARKETING MANAGERS #3-9 (in unison): We ALSO have ideas!

CEO: Great! Will they all make money?

SYSADMIN: Um...we could be running our servers more efficiently if...

CEO: Quiet! There's work going on here.

MARKETING MANAGERS #3-9: YES!

CEO: Excellent! Let's do all the ideas!!!

ENGINEERING MANAGER: Um...excuse me, we don't have very many engineering resources...

(CEO has already walked out the door)

ENGINEERING MANAGER (frowning, dejected): ...oh

--- vs ---

STEVE: Who's got a good idea?

(in the audience 100 hands are raised simultaneously)

STEVE: No. No. Nope. Nu-uh. As if. Yeah right. Nope. Not gonna happen. No. No...

(this goes on)

STEVE: Ok. So we're doing a tablet!

MARKETING MANAGER (obviously new on the job): Um. But, excuse me Mr. Jobs. The tablet market has been stagnating for over a decade and dozens of our competitors who have attempted to enter the market with a myriad of different technologies have all foundered or given up outright.

STEVE (glaring): We're. doing. a. tablet.

It's a wild stroke of luck that he was able to merge the two corpses and finally succeed.

So two turkeys can make an Eagle.

Regarding your tablet story, which is obviously fictional, but I think raises a good point. Apple was originally working on a tablet, before the iPhone. Someone (maybe Jobs) decided that a phone would be better use of the technology today.

Imagine a world where they release the iPad in 2007 w/ no app store. That tablet gets slaughtered in the market. It may well prevent the iPhone from ever getting made, much less given special privileges from ATT.

The simple act of saying, "Not a tablet... not yet" may have been the difference between the greatest turnaround in corporate history and who knows what.

The turn around began before '07, and it wasn't the iPhone that started it. But that is a good point, Ill bet the story would have been quite different if the iPad came first.

...ah, but that's the whole point! The iPad could never have come out before the iPhone because it wasn't perfect yet.

In fact, were the iPad under development at a different company, it probably would have been released in '07. The logic and reasoning from the top execs would have been: "Well, we know we will sell some. We'll probably make back our investment and then some! Besides, working out all of the kinks will take another 3 years and billions of dollars. Who wants to do that?"

This is what annoys me about most people's understanding of MVP. I see too many companies whose approach is: "Here's our thing. It does these 10 things. Each feature works. SHIP IT!"

Instead, the Apple approach is:

ENGINEER: "Here's our thing. It does 10 things."

MANAGER: "Does thing 1 work 100% of the time?"

ENGINEER: "Um...more like 85%"

MANAGER: "Is thing 2 so intuitive that your Grandma could explain it to me?"

ENGINEER: "Well...there's still 5 panels of configuration required..."

(...time passes...)

MANAGER: "Make it do 1 thing."

ENGINEER: "But, but..."

MANAGER: "And it better do that 1 thing better than any damn product even GOD could create!"

ENGINEER: "Ok!"

This is what worries me about Apple post Steve Jobs. While I am almost totally certain that there are people in the company with all the vision and creativity of Steve, I don't think anyone else has the clout to pivot the company on a dime the way Steve did.

I think you're wrong. The last couple pivots weren't even his (though I understand that they did have his approval).

But Apple produces 10 pixel-perfect prototypes for each feature. They compete — and are winnowed down to three, then one, resulting in a highly evolved winner. Because Apple knows the more you compete inside, the less you'll have to compete outside.

Miyamoto does it that way too. Whole ton of people making levels, with Miyamoto reviewing, guiding, and if need be killing.

Under Jobs' leadership, Apple has done 10 times the amount of relevant homework of most companies — internal competitions, supply chain training, endless deal-making, endless recruiting, training, and generating and sustaining employee excitement that you just can't fake.

If others emulated that, all of that, their results would be a lot more like Apple's.

Apple has fairly high profit margins on their products, and this allows them to spend more on development and marketing. I think a lot of companies wouldn't be able to support such a model.

you are being downvoted because your comment has a fairly obvious chicken and egg problem which I don't think you fully reasoned to it's logical conclusion.

I don't see the chicken and egg problem. The company has lots of money to spend on R&D. So they can spend money on competing ideas and choose winners. Not all companies have money to spend on R&D.

and where does the company get the money to spend on R&D? That is the chicken and egg problem. That's like saying Warren Buffet is good at picking stocks because he is rich and can afford to spend more money picking stocks.

Generally by borrowing it, if they don't have a cash surplus.

I don't think you can realistically quantify whatever it is that goes on in the mind of Steve Jobs that sets him apart. Apple fired him and later took him back. I recently read an article which described that to the effect of "he launched Apple twice". It seems to me the words "genius" and "genie" are related and likely this is because whatever goes on inside the minds of some people is so brilliant it might as well be magic to the rest of us. He has something in him that no one else can quite grasp or replicate, some unique combination of knowledge, experience, thought process, perspective and god-knows-what-else which adds up to something that other people simply cannot understand much less do. You can analyze it to death all you want and it won't change it: Other people still won't be able to do whatever it is he does that made Apple what it is.

Not to say analysis has no value. Good, solid analysis has potential to help other people do better. But there is a reason for what this article is calling "the Eureka Myth" and basically some people cannot be entirely demystified, try as we might, even though they may be fully cooperative and making no attempt to "hide" anything.

But there is no mystery! All successful business people have the one same trick. Warren Buffet put it best:

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

I mean, can it be said any more clearly? The problem is, much like putting chocolate cake in front of a fat man on a diet, telling a CEO that they shouldn't take the quick buck because staying the course will yield greater returns in the long term...well, I guess you can imagine how well that works.

Thanks for your reply. But I don't feel that has any real bearing on my point. Investing and building a product are two different things. Steve Jobs took a class in calligraphy. He has said that is why the Mac has beautiful typography and that Microsoft basically copied what Apple was doing, so had he not done that, it's likely no computer would have good typography. I imagine that would have been a significant problem and would have seriously hindered the computer industry. It's a "touchy feely" kind of thing -- I mean it's about aesthetics (or more generally what has personal appeal to humans), which often get dismissed as icing on the cake but, in reality, design of that sort has significant value in terms of legibility and therefore ease of use.

So I think it is pretty widely acknowledged that his influence goes far beyond figuring out how to make money. It goes far beyond merely building Apple. Microsoft copied what he did. His value judgment about what was important (with regards to typography) has thus basically influenced 'all' computers. What I don't think I have ever seen anyone explicitly say is that without his insistence on good typography, it's possible computers would have never been popularized to the degree they have been. That's the kind of thing that mere self discipline doesn't fully explain. I think that's the kind of thing which falls in the "mystique" category.

Peace and have a good day.

I understand what you are saying...that Steve has the taste and design sense to guide Apple's development process. While I agree that this is true, I don't think this is why Apple has been successful. It's Steve's obsession with perfection that has driven the company; his unwillingness to ship just anything that will sell and make money.

Steve doesn't do it all himself. Even much of the original Macintosh design is probably better attributed to Jeff Raskin, Woz, and Bill Atkinson. Steve is a good showman, and good showmen know to never introduce the stage-hands, but Steve has had plenty.

Now, you might argue that if Steve had zero taste, then he also would not have had the sense to demand design perfection. That may be true. But if you are a CEO of a company today and you are hoping to replicate Apple's success, you would be much better served by cutting your product line in 1/4 and demanding absolute perfection from the remaining products, than by going off to find a guru, take Caligraphy classes, and stare at van Gogh all day...

I understand what you are saying...that Steve has the taste and design sense to guide Apple's development process.

No, that's not really what I'm saying. I'm saying that "celebrities" become celebrated in part because whatever it is they do is to some degree baffling to most people and yet wonderful. That which is baffling is more commonly offensive to people. Baffling but wonderful leads to a sense of mystique. If what Steve did could be replicated by just studying his track record, I don't think Apple would have brought him back. That's a rather unusual turn of events. Firing the Big Boss most often leads to deep wounds of a sort that won't close unless hell freezes over.

I will note I am not suggesting anyone run off and find a guru. I'm a big believer in "if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him". People have to learn to think for themselves. That's where the magic of life happens. That's what leads to the best decisions.

Thanks for your reply. Pleasant conversation is always a good thing.

Peace.

Very true! Apple is the foremost example of great design from the inside.

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