Steve Jobs's Real Genius

However, there are thousands/millions of people that are "tweakers". That isn't Jobs' only talent or even his most salient characteristic. (The title of the article is "Steve Job's real genius".)

Did any of the tweakers mentioned in the article start 3 companies and make billions doing it?

I think it is backlash for giving Jobs all the credit for everything, which is a mistake. I agree he didn't "invent" the iPhone, as Obama claimed. He led its development. But it's an equal mistake to say that all he did was tweak things, which the article claims explicitly.

I think you may be framing the issue in the wrong way. Here's a little anecdote from my own experience: When I first studied math, I could solve isolated problems but I still had no feeling for what I was doing. One day, I stumbled upon a more theoretical book: Rudin's Principles of mathematical analysis (or Baby Rudin). The rigor, the very thought process was completely foreign to me. Sometimes I spent an entire day on retracing a few lines of proof. On the side, I read a delightful little book by Polya on How to solve problems. While the former gave me stuff to chew on, the latter gave me words to understand what I was doing when I was chewing. After much huffing and puffing, one day I "got" it. I really did. And to paraphrase SJ here, "I did it in a big way."

If I had stopped right there, I might not know about measure theoretic probability, the theory of point processes, copulas, or any other more or less specialized subjects. But once I crossed that point I always felt confident I _could_ learn whatever subject I chose to and do it quickly if called for.

Even for completely foreign topics, I may not know the details yet, the definitions, the important theorems or the lesser ones that help in establishing them or that shorten their proofs. But I now know how to read mathematical books, the difference between an important and a not so important theorem, what to look for.

Without knowing SJ personally, and only half-way through his biography, I think the above is a valid analogy for the kind of understanding SJ must have had for technology. He somehow "got" it, and that allowed him to intuit special areas quickly, select among alternatives, and perhaps be a better editor of more narrowly focused, deeper minds than any single one of them could have been on its own.

I'm not saying he was singular in this, or that his "getting" it was _the_ reason for his later success. For that, you need more, starting with certain type of self-awareness, social aptitude, luck, etc. etc. But as for his technical compass, I'm pretty sure this is all he needed. If you have this type of confidence and understanding, you can always dig into something and specialize when the problem in front of you calls for it. Or you can learn on whom to rely, whom to poll, etc.

That's the difference between a Ballmer, Lazaridis, any of the other management types with business school backgrounds, say, on one side and Jobs, Page or Zuckerberg, say, on the other.

There is some, but not nearly as much as say what's in win32. This lack of 'crust' can be attributed to SJ's personality. He had no problems dropping something he didn't think worked. This led to headaches for 3rd parties, and is one of the primary reasons enterprise stayed away from Apple (along with no roadmaps).

How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field.

It's not so much that you need to understand every in and out of the field. What you need to understand is effort level required develop something[1], and when you're clearly getting BSed. How much technical knowledge you need to do those two things is the hard part to figure out.

[1] I once had a manager ask me why a change was going to take so long because she thought "it's just and if/then statement."

So Jobs got "lucky" (luck favors the prepared, of course) in his finding Ali to obsess about the NS and Cocoa libraries in all dimensions, with the same kind of taste-making abilities as Jobs had at the larger whole ecosystem level.

He said that it was a mistake only taking the GUI to Apple, and he should have taken the whole Smalltalk environment. This in turn lead directly to why Next (and hence Cocoa) uses Objective-C. The fact that he would argue with Eric Schmidt in a car park about the merits of why Obj-C is a better O-O language (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/eric-schmidt-on-steve-j...) says a lot.

  1. Build a talented team.
  2. Keep it small.
  3. Give them time.
  4. Keep them focused on the end goal not the internals of the project.
  5. Cut all non essential features.

1) Ask smart questions to smart people. Steve seemed to be a master at this - he can sense when someone is glossing over something, and attacks it. I.E.: "What do you mean, 'for now'; will there be problems later on?". Most people don't want to hear the things you clearly omit. Steve went for the jugular.

2) Experience. Heard of the Next computer? Uneconomic - the whole automated assembly, and razor-sharp magnesium corners, and 16 different shades of black thrown out because they weren't quite right drove the costs up too much. Heard of WebObjects? Steve had his failures. He tended to salvage what he could, restart them, and finally get them working; but he still had failures. I bet he learnt a lot from them.

Which is another way of saying that if a team is small and optimally sized they can't go off and do random nonsensical reinvention of wheels.

Many times parsimony is elegance.

When I first looked into it, I was surprised at the extent to which Mac OS X was based on Unix. It seems like they reuse as much as they can, and innovate only where they need to.

Er, that's precisely what Gladwell is arguing.

What's your standard? Name a few products. The Walkman? If the Walkman qualifies as an innovation, then surely the iPhone does.

Calling the Macintosh a tweak on the Xerox Alto I think is also hardly fair. If that is true, then all products ever released have been tweaks, which makes the distinction meaningless.

I'd argue that the Zen Jukebox did not prove that HDD MP3 players could be successful, and that Treos and other smartphones, though proven successful, were not substantially in the same form as an iPhone, and that previous tablets were proven failures and also not substantially in the same form as iPad's.

I think the iPad is really the best example of Jobs' talent being used in a capacity that wasn't just tweaking. Stylus input and finger input are just completely different ways to approach the user interface. An iPad isn't a tweak of previous failed Windows tablets, it's throwing out the basic premise of the machine ("a tablet is just like your computer but in the palm of your hand") and starting from scratch ("what is the purpose of a tablet?").

google: Jobs on Gate no imagination

"Bill basically has no imagination and never find anything, that’s why I think he’s more comfortable this time on philanthropy rather than technological. He’s just shamelessly take others’ ideas,"

There's also another much older quote, which I think is an awesome one for Bill Gates:

"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

In this case, Gladwell is basically crediting Jobs as being part of an engineering tradition that I highly respect without (afaict) Jobs actually possessing the key qualities of that tradition. Doing so makes Jobs look better at the expense of diluting the term, which strikes me as disrespectful to the hackers' accomplishments.

Edit: This is a response to (paraphrased) "Why are you so emotional about this?"

Isaacson is, in places, brutal on Jobs, but he doesn't resort to cheap tricks like this.

Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people.

Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with.

Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker.

This is very troubling.

Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity.

Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.

I just don't see how that was diminishing what Jobs did?

However, I wish I had the patience, clout, timing and resources to say no, until I am satsfied with the outcome (Hopfully before the use expires).

I would love to do so being as humane as possible

Yes.

The amount of research thrown into the likes of a Ferrari end up trickling all the way down to your regular car. From tyre compounds to suspension design to chassis structure to aerodynamics to engine optimization, your daily car would be nowhere as safe, economical, durable and so on without cutting edge technology designed for those ultra high-end cars. I had a nasty car crash that would simply have reduced me to bits ten years ago, but survived with only a few bruises and a bunch of displaced vertebrae. I could have escaped the crash altogether had the car been a couple of years less, and had been equipped with ESP. It would have been impossible to fit such amount of technology in such a cheap and lightweight package without bringing cutting-edge technology and perfect realization to the table at some point, but that comes with an awfully high price tag which can only be afforded by consumer luxury segment and professional racing. R&D in automotive consumes absolutely unfathomable and ridiculous amounts of money.

So yes, a F458, a Corvette ZR1, a Honda NSX-R, a Zonda Cinque, a Bugatti Veyron, an Aston-Martin One-77, a Porsche GT3 RS, a Nissan GT-R, a Tesla Roadster are vehicles of perfection that bring something to the table for society as a whole.

Then I would say that the designer of that car had contributed to society.

People forget what phones looked like in 2006. My parents now both have smart phones that look a lot like iPhones (but aren't) that they spend hours using a day. Like him or not, you can't argue Steve Jobs didn't have a huge impact on modern society.

Everyone who uses a personal computer, smartphone, or tablet of any description, or has watched a 3D computer-animated film, has been affected, for the better, by his life's work. So have the millions around the world who make a living, directly or indirectly, from the businesses he built.

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Jobs' #1 asset was his Reality-Distortion-Field, anyone standing too close to him would get caught in it, it seems.