President Obama on Steve Jobs: "He Changed the Way Each of Us Sees the World" | Hacker News Reader

President Obama on Steve Jobs: "He Changed the Way Each of Us Sees the World"

whitehouse.gov

479 pointshornokplease60 comments

You know you're a big deal when the president of the United States makes a statement about your death just hours after the news breaks.

Can't agree more.

It saddens me that the engineers and workers who actually designed and built the stuff will die unknown. Just reinforces that fame, popularity, charisma, self-promotion, wealth, and the ability to "manage" trump deep technical abilities.

https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/121744770480615425

a retweet (not me). but, it struck a chord with me.

"Why do we care more about salesmen than scientists?"

Saying Jobs was /just/ a salesman is beyond incorrect.

But on a deeper level: making a useful widget is one thing, succeeding at convincing the world that they need it is quite another.

ideas are nice, products are better, but Jobs could execute like none-other

Harder to evaluate the value of scientist's legacy. And, apart from being entrepreneur's inspiration, Steve is a bit of a pop figure.

Or it's simply that salesmen are more popular as it's them who bring the results of scientists' work to lives of millions.

People care about faces they know about.

Normal people don't have knowledge about scientists or engineers in our field that helped changed the world. It is partly sad, as they do know about the crackheads that appear on MTV, and I would bet it would be major news if Britney Spears would die.

Personally I am not offended that Steve Jobs is getting so much attention. At least here's someone that we can partly identify with, here's someone that did bring real value and who's death does reach normal people.

And I don't know how much has Steve changed my life with the work he did on Apple, but he definitely changed my life with his speech at Standford, which I watched on Youtube from hundreds of miles away from where it happened, on an iPod Touch.

The fewer people that can understand your accomplishments, the fewer will notice and mourn your passing.

Why do we care so much about genius scientists but dismiss genius dilletantes?

Also, why do we have to dillute our opinion on people and reduce them to the stereotypes? Is it something we do just to feel better?

Saying that Steve Jobs was just a salesman is as incorrect as saying that Edsger Dijkstra was just an arrogant man. I'm sorry, but both were MUCH more than that.

Without the assistance of a person (or people) with all of those other characteristics, deep technical abilities accomplish nothing. If it were not for Steve the engineers and workers who actually designed and built the stuff would still have died unknown and they would have also probably died without having anything of significance to point to and say "I helped create that."

I think giving virtually all of the credit, wealth and social standing to the "visionary" is a massive error which shafts a lot of people, who are even more rare, unique and talented than Steve Jobs. He deserves a lot of credit to be sure, but it's almost insulting to say that engineers couldn't design a phone on their own.

Ives and a lot of other higher ups at Apple get a lot of credit. But I think your comments are misguided. I think working at Apple carries a certain level of prestige in itself, and I know they are rewarded with a great salary.

Without a Jobs, they wouldn't be given the opportunity nor would they be kept in focus to finish the job. As someone who avoided the management track it gives me no pleasure to say this but good leaders are necessary because they are the catalyst, engineers are a dime a dozen.

Great leaders are as common as great engineers.

It's hard to say who deserves the most credit. But Steve Jobs was the one pushing to push stuff past the competitors. I bet Samsung, ASUS, and the likes have or could hire equally skilled designers. But the people on top want to cut costs, so they don't opt for the milled aluminium case, or buying the companies they need to secure technology. Steve was the one pushing those envelopes, allowing them the resources to accomplish those goals. You give any designer, engineer a goal with very little limits and its amazing what they can come up with. But its really important that someone is there to give them that.

Steve gave massive credit to the talent and sweat of Apple's engineers and designers in nearly every keynote. He was as humble as you could expect of a CEO.

Yes, he did thank the engineers and designers in his keynotes – COLLECTIVELY. However, he also specifically abolished the previous practice of naming all software engineers involved in OS releases.

Admittedly, there were plausible reasons given for this, but I felt that ultimately, the reason why Pixar gives personal credit to their movie contributors, while Apple does not do the same for its engineers, is that our industry is not unionized.

I don't think Pixar's unionized - not under IATSE, at least...

There are often consequences to working in a largely unionized industry even when your particular company isn't unionized, though.

I read somewhere that this was because of concerns with talent getting poached by other companies (which was especially a concern in the early days of OS X, when Apple was still "beleagured". Still, point taken; there are lot of unsung heroes within Apple's ranks.

I think what might be more problematic is our systemic bias toward attributing the "credit" (monetary and social credit) to any significant work to one person. This just causes pretty much any collaborative work that is not between "pure" friends to devolve into resentment.

I think this has deep roots in American individualistic philosophy, and it's an example of how damaging it can be.

Well Steve Wozniak also became a billionaire, so while Jobs may have gotten more money but he also ran Pixar so it's not all that one sided. As to the "collective" effort argument that IMO that often get's into a social constructs where people are expected to sacrifice for the company and get rewarded for it. Where I prefer the concept of people who are directly compensated upfront for there efforts vs the social contract of working for a promotion etc. You can't be cheated out of a pension you where never supposed to have.

This is an appropriate topic for HN, since it has to do with roles & responsibilities w/i a company. So, let's try to correct some misconceptions.

Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple. And...

“A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.” (from Fred Wilson, Venture Capitalist icon, requoting something he was taught early in his professional career)

Jobs showed that he was able to do all three of these things extremely well, arguably better any other CEO of our time. He did communicate a vision and strategy [#1], and he used that vision and strategy to recruit the very best talent for Apple [#2], people better than Jobs himself was at getting done what needed to be done (i.e., the people you lament "will die unknown"). His ability to do both those things - and to make sure that everyone performed and delivered in line with the vision [#!, again] - is why Apple is projected to have $90+BILLION in cash reserves at the end of the year [#3], climbed from $10/share to $400/share, and is the highest valued tech company in the world.

Remember, too that history reinforces that technical ability minus a clear vision and strong leadership doesn't produce Mac OS X/iOS, MacBook Airs, iPods, iPhones or iPads. They produce Pink/Taligent, 20th Anniversary Macs, Newtons, MacTVs and Pippins. And a company that loses its leadership position, is valued at $10/share, and comes within sight of bankruptcy.

I agree that this is suboptimal. But it's true that you need both business and technical skills to get something out the door competently. And for these engineers and workers, the feeling of fulfillment that they have working for Steve is real and satisfies what I believe to be an actual human need: to feel competent and useful.

I just wish there was some other way to go about things than for, basically, impressionable technical types to be manipulated into doing work for narcissists.

Maybe the problem is, again, education. School generally doesn't prepare you to be a good salesman, which is unfortunate because that's the only kind of skill you need to actually get ahead in the real world.

As one of those former engineers at Apple, I can say definitively that Steve deserves it. Without him, we'd never have had the canvas on which to paint.

He made our contributions possible.

I'm not a Mac person myself, but I do respect their design philosophy in the sense you don't have to do wild new things -- just standard things really well. So, by proxy I respect their engineers quite a bit. My only beef, really, was with their marketing department and some of their draconian business decisions.

Steve didn't manage, he led. Big difference.

Also, if your obituary is simultaneously all 25 top stories on HN.

Top 33, by my count.

"And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented." <--- This is most telling.

Not to be a douche(I shed some tears upon hearing the news and remain a tad shocked), but the accuracy of the above statement by Obama is very questionable IMO. Vast majority of the world still doesn't own an Apple device, I'd argue. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

That said, I did hear the news from my iPhone. And this comment? It's also coming from the same thing.

"much of the world" not "most of the world"

It's a subtle difference in wording, but the meaning is very different.

It's not only about Apple products, it's about personal computers, or large touch-screen based smartphones. Without the (first) Macintosh, the PC ecosystem would be different.

Xerox might have something to say about that. Considering they were widely regarded as having the first Graphical UI. And some of the first Mac team came from Xerox. Who knows what would have happened if Xerox moved forward with it.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/comment//2011/10/03a11...

Chills.

Very apt.

There is an easter-egg from this 'Think Different' campaign in OSX. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different#Mac_OS_X

If you look super carefully at the book emoji on the iPhone, same deal.

"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

"think differently" <-- i wonder if this was intentional.

I thought the same. Nice homage, to be sure.

Intentional, no doubt.

As was the next allusion to "change".

And yet, he uses a Blackberry.

That's a bit hyperbolic.

No it isn't. It's 100% true.

If we can't honestly appreciate the incredible magnitude of the effect this man had on our world today of all days, when will we be able to?

Why do you(or the president) think exaggerating his accomplishments is warranted or even tasteful?

It's not 100% true, I know plenty of people with no apple devices, who don't care at all about apple or it's products.

Personality cults like this are embarrassing, and a major weakness for critical thinking. Celebrate the man for what he did, not some deified hero icon.

Even if you don't own anything made by Apple and don't care at all about it, it's hard to deny that it has had a major influence on computing, and through that on the modern world in general.

That's fair. I don't see a lot of balanced assessment though.

I'm gonna have to agree and say that the hyperbole about what this man accomplished is over-the-top. He didn't change the world in any meaningful way. He made great products, and that's about as far as his influence extends to the world.

The guy who invented the toilet "changed the world". Mark Zuckerburg has changed the world far more than Steve Jobs. Sometimes people need a reality check.

Oh, yeah. Facebook would definitely have happened the same way without the Macintosh.

Seriously, do you guys not know who we're talking about here?

Perhaps I'm a little too young to fully understand the history here, and yeah he's had his influence on computing in many ways. But so have a lot of other people who were far more influential that have wallowed in obscurity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but macintosh didn't usher computing into the mainstream. Up until the ipod, apple has always been a very niche company.

He's as popular as he is precisely because he's charismatic and filthy rich. He embodies the "New American Dream" (wealth and fame). That's why we have so much reverence for him. Then we exaggerate his actual impact on the world to square with our inflated reverence.

The Macintosh wasn't the first personal computer the same way the iMac wasn't the first all-in-one, or the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player: it wasn't, except for most people, it was. It wasn't anything fundamentally new or special, but it changed everything.

As for influence... True, lots of people have been strongly influential. Take Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTTP, HTML, and the first web browser... On a NeXT, a computer built by one Steve Jobs.

It's all too easy to play up the impact that artists, politicians, and speakers have, we see them foisting their worldview on the Universe and begging people to accept it and to be changed by it. But artisans and industrialists can have just as much if not greater impact. Steve Jobs invented, perfected, and helped popularized devices, services, and ideas that affected many, many people's lives and livelihoods. Unimaginable amounts of art has been made using the tools that he had a very large hand in, and that barely touches the impact he has had on the world. He wasn't a saint, he wasn't a poet, but he touched and changed an unimaginable number of lives, for that he deserves respect.

Respect is honoring his accomplishments, inflating them is disrespectful.

It is no inflation to say this man is the greatest inventor/innovator I have seen in my life time. Saying someone is great does not take greatness away from anyone else. Many people can be great, Steve was great.

>It is no inflation to say this man is the greatest inventor/innovator I have seen in my life time. ... Many people can be great, Steve was great.

Steve seems more of an amazing businessman and salesman, with exceptional taste, than inventor/innovator. Apple's considerable achievements come largely from taking the inventions of others and making them attractive to the marketplace.

Taking inventions from others and making them attractive to the marketplace is innovation. :)

Henry Ford did not invent the car but he was the best innovator if it.

However, it is no exaggeration to say Apple reinvented many products time and time again.

Ah, you are correct about "innovation".

Still, it seems that Apple gets a lot of credit they shouldn't... people, for example, think Apple invented smartphones when, in fact, Palm deserves credit.

Steve was a leader and his skill was recognizing the good inventions and innovations between the chaff.

Mr. Jobs was an amazing person. I sincerely hope the President is mourning his loss. Unfortunately, his prior statements make me wonder whether he truly understood what Mr. Jobs added to our culture through the inventions he helped pioneer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7...

Is the Telegraph one of those rags that tries to be controversial just to get views? I was (before today) under the impression that they were a reputable paper but they also had to take some shots at Jobs' personal live in his Obituary. What Steve did in his personal life is none of our business. Maybe he did treat someone in his life poorly. That might mean I wouldn't have wanted to be his personal friend, but it doesn't change the fact that Steve literally changed the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com