In Praise of Bad Steve
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Maybe my ego is sturdier now, because I wonder if I wouldn't have enjoyed the challenges he set people. One thing is for sure, you could know that if you did what he wanted, it wasn't going to be a me-too product.
In retrospect, I realized that I wasn't really afraid of Steve. I was afraid of myself: my limitations, my shortcomings, my relative talent (or lack thereof), and my performance in life vis-a-vis my self-theorized potential. When I saw Steve Jobs in the flesh, I saw an embodiment of everything I was not, and probably never would be. Frankly, I felt like a fraud. I felt unworthy.
A lot of that seems silly now, and will strike readers of this post as childish, if not fawningly fanboyish. But it was a very intense feeling that he inspired, even if unintentionally.
Steve Jobs is not in that category. His combination of vision, discipline, and courage is unusual.
Mostly we fear ourselves, what we are, what we aren't, etc. Whether the dialogue is accurate or not, well, that's up to us individually, and so is what we do with it.
Situations and experiences can hold a mirror up to us - so to speak - wherein we're forced to confront these fears of ourselves. It's interesting that the Steve persona did that to you. I doubt it was intentional on his part, just part of who he was, a part of the legacy he had created and you.
Folks who are less confident (or - more modest) might be more likely to apply now.
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKx...
For many people, that kind of anal attention to detail (and describing it as an "urgent" matter) would be the key sign of a "bad" boss. I think it's acceptable in Steve because if anyone has shown a good grasp of the cost-benefit analysis of such perfection, it's him.
Had we all been doing the same analysis in the mid-90's when NeXT was failing and Pixar a mostly academic curiosity, I doubt anyone would be talking about how great a judge of the "cost-benefit analysis of perfection" he was.
The man took a company that was going out of business and turned it into the largest company in the world. I don't think this talk is "hyperbole" in the least.
I agree if this was to happen back in the 90s, he wouldn't be as praised as he is today, but what does that have to do with anything? If I was to judge anyone before their greatest moments, they wouldn't pass the bar. And yeah, he was kind of an ass in his early days, but by most accounts he became a lot more mellow when returning to Apple.
The PC industry is working just fine, and a Mac and PC are more similar than they are different.
The music industry has hardly changed due to the iPod, you sell one way you sell another - that's not disruption.
And the phone industry most certainly did not change, it's just an incremental improvement on the fancy phones that have been getting steadily better. The iPhone may be great, but fundamentally it's just a better version of what was already there.
His business was taking an idea and perfecting it so people liked and used it. But it was not disruption.
But I'd say iTunes (music store) was disruptive. It changed how the music industry operated.
The iphone changed how we 'use' phones more than it changed the 'phone industry'. In fact, on writing that, I think that captures what Apple does best, it 'disrupts' how people perceive and use a product, that may in-turn distrupt an industry, but that is a consequence, not the goal (for Apple).
I think you have a good point about the timing of all of this. However, Steve was consistently and shockingly successful for the past decade and a half, which I think is more than enough time to say that these qualities aren't just an artifact of timing.
Remember that Apple wasn't shopping for Jobs, they were shopping for a modern OS; they only turned to NeXT after Gassée fucked-up their deal to buy Be.
For Apple, having the NeXT talent and what became OSX, it was a success for them. So NeXT had value - it was not a "-1" as a company going bankrupt would be.
And if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, and the technologies pioneered at it went on to power almost every major product Google released for the following 15 years, people would consider it a deeply influential and successful company.
People seem to grade NeXT on a very, very steep curve.
You really don't think the iPod was an industry-dominating hit? They sold hundreds of millions of them, and no other company ever really came up with a successful answer to them. It was left to Apple itself to kill them with the iPhone.
It's very interesting to watch all this historical revisionism that paints Jobs as the mysterious shadowy figure that was the creator of the digital portable music device, which was a boom product from day 1. Don't forget, Apple has also had several flops over the past decade, but no-one remembers them because of selective bias.
Jobs was an incredible man, but let's see him for what he did; don't turn him into a myth.
Additionally, Jobs' relentless addition/pruning of the iPod lines (mini/shuffle/nano/color/touch/etc) kept Apple with both a streamlined offering and ~70% market share.
I'm not arguing that the first ("less space than a nomad") iPod was a revolutionary device at launch. But dismissing the iPod's success as "savvy marketing" is doing the device a huge disservice.
Loading music was no better or worse than other players I had, but iTunes was still horrendous bloatware. Why do I need to install Quicktime - absolutely and utterly useless to me - to simply move files from hard drive to ipod?! Some MP3 players I had just let you drag and drop with a file explorer and they would 'just work', plus you could use the software to do it 'properly' if you felt like. One chinese knock-off I had simply played the songs in the order you copied them on, which was weird :) Then there's things like radios - ipod had none, despite it being a clear feature people wanted for years.
But yes, I had several MP3 players of the era, and the ipod was nothing special in terms of user experience. The hardware case was pretty, admittedly.
People are viewing the early digital music player market with the rosy-coloured glasses of historical revisionism. Apple are top dog now, so it somehow stands to reason they always were? Logical fallacy. The early ipods weren't great, and it wasn't Apple out there leading us all into the digital music new world, there was a passel of competitors.
I think you also underestimate marketing - higher market share does not mean that the product is inherently better (betamax vs VHS, anyone? Or the OS war of your choice?). Apple has an incredible marketing team, and frankly good marketing does mean something significant, or there wouldn't be so much money in it.
I literally had the exact opposite experience you did. I couldn't afford an iPod when it was released, so I bought the Chinese knock-off. Several, actually -- I worked at Circuit City at the time and got an incredible employee discounts on them. And all had horrendous software, as well as plenty of hardware glitches. The software rarely worked as advertised and I usually had to resort to some sort of hack or third party program to get MP3's loaded in any sort of format I wanted them to work in.
It wasn't until years later when I could finally afford an iPod Mini that I finally found an MP3 player that worked on even a basic serviceable level. I still have that iPod mini, and it works perfect. If I didn't have an iPhone already, that would be my MP3 player for when I work out.
If you're speaking to computer know-how and aptitude, I am a programmer today, so I do not feel it is my ability that held me back.
Other than offering more capacity (years later at a higher price), the iPod really wasn't radically better than my old Nomad. I'll grant that the iPod was a great product, but it wasn't a revolutionary product in the way that the iPhone was. The iPod is certainly better than the absolute worst of the market, but it was only a little better than the best of the market at the time.
MP3 players sucked. You had to manually copy music onto them or use the absolutely crappy music libraries that came with them.
With the iPod you have your nicely organized music library and you sync it with your device. For the vast majority of people that so much better than manually copying music. I would never want to go back to the world where I copied music manually.
The iPod didn't win by accident, or cause of marketing. Sometimes the best product wins.
I bought a Nomad in August 2001 (roughly two months before the iPod came out). I have never had more remorse at being an early adopter.
The Nomad was the size of two Sony CD Walkmans stuck together. Its interface was a series of four fiddly buttons and a dire lo-res LCD screen. The iPod was a tremendous improvement in every single respect.
The reason why the iPod wasn't an immediate hit was because it was only available for the Mac. iTunes for Windows didn't get released until 2003.
If the iPod sucked in 2002, every other hard-drive based MP3 player sucked more.
The iPod was an industry dominating hit. That’s a fact, not revisionism. A look at its marketshare over the years suffices.
Also: iTMS. It changed the music industry. To claim otherwise would be absurd.
There's another thing.
Ever notice that so many of the most popular American tourist destinations are places like machu picchu, the great wall of china, the pyramids, etc? The fact that these places exist says far less about their creators than it does about the societies that produced them. (Although perhaps the fact that Americans are obsessed with the monuments of slavery and fascism says something about us.)
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pyramids/pyramids.html#who
Slaves can have skill, families and pride in their work. Historically some slaves were trusted to go out on their own and do business for their owner, and not run away!
Some slaves became so important to their master than they actually inherited the estate when the master died.
So they may have been high level slaves, but slaves nonetheless.
Relationships are complicated, maybe its best not to put labels on things.
In all seriousness though, regardless of what their specific status was, most societies where people are building things like pyramids tend to be pretty messed up.
A slave can still be paid.
Based on my definition of slave I believe the pyramids were built by slaves.
> Therefore all innovation
because I think progress can still happen in a world that does not adapt to change, but innovation cannot.
I feel that progress implies innovation. Shaw's quote was meant to be general and universal, applying to crazy inventors as well Women who wanted to vote, and people of color who wanted equal rights. All of these people probably seemed unreasonable to their peers at one point.
There is a grain of truth I suppose, vis-a-vis humanity's general restlessness, fixing what ain't broke, etc, but I think that this generalisation that anyone who isn't perfectly happy and satisfied with the exact present state of things is "unreasonable" is not true at all.
I guess if the Steve Jobs aquarium urban legend didn't sound unreasonable, you probably have the silicon valley mindset. It's really easy to think of the current state of things and to feel that everything done up to now is 'reasonable'; especially if you live in a really progressive, techno-friendly place like Silicon Valley. You need to know the historical context from the perspective of an average non-technical person in places that aren't as open minded and progressive. One example would be an average person wondering why people wasted their time making unreliable experimental horseless carriages when clearly horses were superior. I also can't help but think of the author of Gulliver's Travels making fun of people experimenting with electricity.
However, I'd bet that > 90% of people who are praising him now would never have enjoyed working for him in any capacity.
People sometimes stay in otherwise intolerably boring jobs for years because they really like their bosses and/or coworkers, and sometimes they stay in incredibly exciting and fulfilling jobs for years despite loathing same.
Tangent: One person would have first hand knowledge of Steve's management style: Andy Hertzfeld of the original Macintosh team: https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts
I would have loved to work for Steve Jobs as he's passionate and demanding about things that do matter. The perfection makes a difference in the product rather than making a difference in his ego.
Thomas Edison (http://www.reformation.org/thomas-edison.html) comes to mind.
The class that includes Edison and Jobs is the class that wins the recognition and respect of the general public, including my 80 year old aunt who has never used an Apple product. I guess of doesn't really matter though, if the luminaries and some of their fans choose not to care what the public thinks. The nice thing about choosing your own definition of success is that we can congratulate both Jobs and Woz for their success even though they reached incredibly divergent outcomes and there is no way they could have ever both reached the same point.
Yes, sometimes I wish I could be Steve and herd the Geek community. I could make a shippable Linux that consumers would pay for. Gnome, KDE, Unity... Hey, let's call it LibreOffice... get it?
Geeks should try to think like normal humans... All that effort could actually change the world.
Steve understood what is important in a product, and more importantly, what is not. The Linux community, for example, has spent many years divided, building several window managers and hundreds of distros, never focusing on what is really important to consumers, in general. The iPad already has more Internet market share than desktop Linux in a very short period of time.
Was that better guys? Personally I like my first response better. Definitely had more flavor, but hey, this is HN and one needs to tread lightly.
Talking about how there's always going to be some air is completely missing the point. The point is that you can always push things a little further.
That first iPod had a hard disk. Hard disks have disk heads that float on air.
Typical lenses aren't flat at the back; CCDs or films are. You could fill that void with glass with a different index of refraction, but that would only make the thing heavier, not smaller.
Hard disk drives are sealed, you're not going to get much air out of dropping an HDD (especially a 1.8" one) in water.
Even more amusingly, hard drives need that air inside to operate and they won't work at high altitudes.
[^1]: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1000&me...
Let's not forget that early Apple was modelled after Sony of the time. Also, under the context of Japanese culture the kind of attitude displayed by the 'boss' in the story is less striking or unusual.