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gipp

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.

Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

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> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.

Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.

I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.

There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.

Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.

What is FUTO?

Just a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org

Yeah, this is what I meant.

I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."

It's almost too on the nose to do this level of silly mythologizing through a half-baked analogy (a favorite rhetorical handwave of the so-called "founder cult") of Mark Zuckerberg of all people in this particular thread. Excellent poe if true

When Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer?

This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.

This isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.

NVidia makes more money on a GPU sale than the vendor selling it, even though it's farther from the consumer.

This is a completely false equivalence. While the coffee farmers do deserve to get paid more Starbucks is also doing an incredible amount of supply chain management, making sure that the stores work and they are also employing a bunch of more people and they're getting a bunch of things in place for that coffee to be sold.

I feel the same way you do, then I realize how depressing it is, this attitude that the only thing that matters is monetary compensation / ownership of monetizable patents. I guess I was naive, but that's the game and everything else is noise.

I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it.

I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.

exactly! tech needs more Woz+Jobs and less Cooks.

> unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's

I suggest you read the post again. It's not against MBAs as such, its against blowhard "heroes" that go around trying to proxy what Jobs did by copying him being an utter prick, rather than a domain expert.

Jobs was successful despite him being a prick. He was fired for not doing what he was supposed to do, and over stepping his mark.

NeXT Inc. burnt a boat load of cash, and were destined for obscurity had they not been bought by apple.

I personally don't like Zuckerberg, but hes not an altman. Altman has virtually no redeeming qualities apart from being able to make PG think he's jesus.

Zuckerberg has many fucking faults, but he is much much closer to Woz than Jobs. Thats probably part of the reason why he's so hated. Because he's either incapable or unwilling to worry about the public persona.

Altman is in the same class as Adam Neumann, ie a mystery cult with great funding, that happens to be a tech CEO.

> right products, the right packages and the right timing

Hmmm, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Apple III, Apple Lisa, Apple Newton, Apple Pippin.

My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software.

101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.

That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.

And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.

My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.

You don't like yet another business intelligence platform to help optimize your marketing spend?

Those are the exception and get me amped up.

Yeah — for God's sake I wish tech was even "all Jobs and no Woz." At least under Jobs, Apple came up with the iPod and the iPhone!

The 101 billboards are endemic of no Woz and no Jobs. Just... blandness. Beige. Cubicles updated for an open office plan.

I think you're onto something. Even the consumer facing stuff seems more interested in chasing OKRs than putting out a compelling product.

When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).

No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE

How many years need to pass until HN stops with the "what would Steve Jobs do"-mentality, where it's entirely unclear how he would operate in the current environment and where Apple would've been with him still being in charge (if he still were in charge - he would've turned 70 next year). It's been 13 years. I think most assessments are merely projection by now.

And Woz got bored of big tech 40 years ago...

That’s a really good line and I’d love to read a blog post that distills to it. But this ain’t it.

I bet a young Woz today would be a hell of a lot better off in Graham’s world than in this guy’s “big companies are great” world.

I read the post till the end. It never mentioned big companies being good or great.

Can you quote the part?

Typically when someone stresses how somebody doesn’t have certain experience it’s because they themselves have that experience and value it highly.

In this case the OP stresses Graham’s lack of experience working for big companies.

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