What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
inventor-labs.com
inventor-labs.com
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html
Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently:
>Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field".
>Every. Single. Time.
>Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together.
It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.
At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made.
After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him.
Walter Isaacson sort of ruined it.
EDIT: I should be clear that I thoroughly admire Steve Wozniak (one of my first heroes), Jony Ive, and Jef Raskin.
Maybe iWoz is more sympathetic towards Jobs (even if it narrates a deception of Woz by Jobs)
Because it shows Jobs getting free chips for Woz, getting deals, etc, it shows a more 'powerless' side of Jobs.
> that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2
> were made
What he was in reality I have no clue of.
I get that feeling a lot from research, concepts, and so on. I end up building the products I want to use, and it turns out that's a really good way to build something people like.
The way you word it makes it sound like it's all about selling things to other people — where I really believe that Steve Jobs under Apple and NeXT was designing the computers, devices and software that he personally wanted to exist. Selling them was a way to continue to fund that process.
Based on my personal experience with 'Jobsian' types, I have found this to be true as well. I've met many people who were brilliant at things, but under these types, even those with less brilliance often performed better. Anecdotal evidence, true, but still. My point is that it is fine to acknowledge their genius AND that he might have played a more important role than just money/power.
I'm generally fairly negative about him because 1. I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society (producer products are the future), and I worry that if they ever 'won' or even came as close to winning as Microsoft did for a while that there would be no place for me in such a world. No plausible endgame for Apple is good for me (although they've done a lot of good in breaking the stranglehold of windows and making the concept of other OS more mainstream).
There's a little bit of 3. too, which is that most of what I've read of him makes him come across as a bit of a nightmare as a person.
Anyway, this article felt very real, and just talked about a guy with passion who left the CEO hat at the door. That would be a guy I could potentially respect.
In one sense, Apple has encourage people to be producers by making it easier to produce financially-viable software. Are you comparing Apple's vision with Microsoft's, or do you have something else in mind?
But producers produce products for consumers to consume. You can't just eliminate the consumer side of the equation. Without one there isn't the other.
Not necessarily. You can be a producer for yourself. I think the GP is arguing that technologies like 3D printing and practices like home gardening will flourish in the near future. Rather than buy stuff per se, people will buy equipment and tools that allow them to produce for themselves the stuff they would have bought.
I think iMovie and the iMac DV phase was a period where Apple actually aspired to this, though. They obsessed over making the best possible computers and software for people to make great home movies, just as they were obsessing over Final Cut and the Power Mac for the professional market. The Mac used to have a reputation as the platform for creative people in all fields, and the "think different" campaign was an effort to reinforce that.
Unfortunately, most people don't want to be creative and Apple had an opportunity to pursue the consumer market. They still try, with Garageband and iPhoto and iMovie, but it's less of a focus.
So, Isaacson fails as a book that will help you understand Job's work, or his management style, or what he did to turn Apple around--which I think had quite a bit to do with Apple's habit of leveraging technologies across products, developing economies of scale, and having people work in small, autonomous teams.
It's still a good book, though--I think it painted a balanced picture of an obsessive and mercurial man who, slowly, almost became a normal person.
Half joking aside, it would have been nice if the author would have spent more than 1/5th of the article actually talking about what he claimed he was going to give insight on. Instead the author spent most of the article tooting his own horn, which is fine, if that's what the title had indicated to expect.
He worked with him closely, then stepped away and came back. Multiple times. By telling the story of this, he lets readers know that he wasn't always by his side and that he left to try other things but circled back at different junctures in his life and in Steve's.
Knowing Glenn and his successes and failures and talking with him over many a margarita at Compadres (after long bouts of writing NeXTSTEP code with him), the story brought strong memories and a very clear voice of different periods and circumstances across several years. He shows an arc of ups and downs in both careers and a lot of hard work and sweat that often didn't get notice until many years later if at all.
Rereading the story, I don't get boastful at all. I get much appreciation for being able to be on a pretty cool ride and being able to create some great products. There's also disappointment in some hard work that didn't pay off. But above all appreciation for someone who continually rolled up his sleeves to get in the ring, take chances, and build something... or in this case tell a damn good story.
"Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. "
It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.
Edit: Forgot a word..
I think that Apple tends to be a bit echo-chambery, but they've historically built solid stuff, so it's hard to criticize their development methodology too heavily. It'll be interesting to see how that contrasts with changes in their corporate ethos in a post-Jobs era.
There was only ONE thing Apple did wrong with Apple Maps. And that was to not license data far, far more aggressively.
The fact is that Google Maps as an app is buggy, lags terribly and clunky all round. It's the high quality of the data that sets it apart.
It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with the device, depend on to help them in a confusing situation.
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.
I'm know there were problems with maps, but a lot of the teeth gnashing was/is exaggerated drama. Google routinely places silly things at the corner of Van Ness and Market, because it has no idea where they belong -- you just don't hear about it because nobody nitpicks Google Maps the way they did Apple's launch.
Also the markets they helped define have changed dramatically as a result of their involvement. So many variables... The best we can really say for now is this is Apple's history as known to outsiders. They accomplished these results. Take it as a data point.
I've worked at Apple before and it wasn't that different to every other large corporation. Excluding obviously the hardware design and critical features. But everything else was par for the course.
EVERY large company has politics and empire building. Especially when you are a multinational and have a driven workforce.
Microsoft is worse than most because its ranking system actually encourages you to compete within your team not just outside.
I was a dev in Windows from 2008 to late 2011. Many comments from Mini MSFT resonated with me. My review history was never bad, but knowing precisely who in my peer group got more money (by watching title changes) and knowing which talented, hardworking devs got shafted (by private conversations) was really bad for my morale. Every review period I'd reliably see the same set of folks (manager's favorites) get regular title changes for doing crap work, and the same bright hardworking people doing the "real work" would be given some lame excuse (if not outright set up for failure) and told to just reach a little higher next year. It stings.
Never mind the outright stupidity of a system where a theoretical "dream team" of 10 hardworking, talented, best in class individuals would need to have 1 go without a bonus every year.
Maybe they'll be more diplomatic than what I'm writing, but I don't know anyone at Microsoft whose opinion I respect that won't concede these points or admit that there's a problem.
I think that's a cynical view of it. Like your sibling post from Firehed says, it's probably more about "not getting too many cooks in the kitchen" than being territorial, as well as preventing the poison of uninformed public opinion from killing a project before it was released.
Think back to May 2007. Remember some of the iPhone mockups people were throwing around? Aside from being largely impractical and stupid, there was clearly no "right" way to do it that was obvious to everyone, as the mocks were so incredibly varied. At some point, you have to make a bet on what the best way to proceed is and go with it, or else you'll spend all day debating and not actually get anything done. That's far easier in small, "secretive" groups.
>"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M"
and
>"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."
Really? I've always considered it the only way to look at it.
And I wonder how critically important it was, also, that the mixing pot be attended in person, with spoken words the only ingredients allowed?
If it's done by email, no-one forgets which idea was the CEO's.
"Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, __he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.__"
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
from: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Fi...
Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
Obviously many people just ripped their own CDs. Many CD-ROMs didn't support ripping CDs at a data level - so you had to rip in real-time via analog! Crazy.
That was a pretty good collection.
Edit almost forgot about Ethernet in the dorms. I picked my college because of high speed Internet.
I doubt anyone actually owned the Sony Mavica for their own "personal" uses. It ran out of battery after 30 pictures or so, and you needed to carry around a bunch of floppies. My crappy disposable camera could take better pictures than that thing.
I'm not sure if I would consider the 3.5" floppy disk as a "relevant sized mass storage" but 1.4mb was probably pretty big in those days. When I bought windows 95, it came in 28 floppy disks.
I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.
> Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997), the first digital camera of the Mavica series.
> The later Digital Mavicas recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market.
[...]
> and a new CD Mavica series — which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.
The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a fixed-focus device with secondary viewfinder glass, no on-board LCD display, and it weighed about 0.5Kg (one of your old-school pounds). It was mostly marketed at estate agents and other professions who needed to snap shots and upload them to a computer frequently; as a consumer device it was a bit crap -- twice the cost of a cheap photo-film SLR and vastly inferior quality.
What made digital cameras practical was cheap expandability (remember when a 16Mb CF card was expensive and bleeding edge?) and digital viewfinder backs. Which didn't really arrive at a consumer-friendly price point until 1999-2000 (I remember paying £700 for a 1.4 megapixel camera with a digital viewfinder circa 1999-ish).
Which in turn tells us why iPhoto didn't come along until the turn of the millennium ...
Once I had my first digital camera I immediately amassed thousands of photos, and I didn't have a Mac.
- How did he hire? What traits was he looking for? How did he evaluate technical ability? He seemed able to hire technical people able to stretch through the conventionally accepted boundaries. - How did he manage technical people? He seemed able to identify those boundaries that could be pushed through, and motivate people through them. - How did he envision the plausible technical possibilities outside the conventional wisdom? - How did he envision product possibilities enabled by the combination of those various possibilities?
I get the love of design and focus on user experience. It's the ability to find to that at the edge of technical possibility that seems unique to me.
"In 1991, I started work at NeXT, as Product Manager for Interpersonal Computing. It was the internet, before there was much of an internet. We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW was born."
The web existed in 1991, and Mosaic was launched in 1993. I first saw it in 1993, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. Have I misunderstood his '5 years later' statement?
BTW, the web was a big deal in a very small circle. In the Fall of 1994, I took a college ENG 100 course that explained how to email and browse the web. It was still very early days.
Q: What is it really like working with Steve Jobs?
A: It wasn't magic, it was hard work, thoughtful design, and constant iteration.
No way, really? Come on, I'm sure everyone on HN knows that this is true for any product.
Jobs still managed to create products that a significant chunk of humanity subjectively enjoys. That's not easy.
If Jobs was Apple, there should still be some skunkworks projects left behind to ship and the numbers are still favorable to Apple.
Perhaps Jobs started that process, but I'm sure it still exists with him gone.
Even a genius can err at times ;)
Segall’s description of Jobs includes an important additional component: obsession with keeping things simple (hence the book title). Segall provides numerous anecdotes of Jobs beating an idea with the “Simple Stick,” as he calls it, and compares it favorably against his relatively frustrating experiences working with other companies like Intel and Dell.
Here is Jobs presenting the Digital Hub concept at Macworld 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8 (See also http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/1... ) You can also see how the Digital Hub idea evidently influenced the layout of the Apple Store http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.h.... : the stands devoted to a particular kind of task, with appropriate gadgets attached to a Mac.
It's interesting that everyone seems to come away with this opinion, I wonder what it says about Steve's personality. I remember from reading his biography that many of the people he ultimately had failings out with claimed the exact same thing.
there's nothing magical about it. if that's what you look for, you will be disappointed. he wasn't some kind of genius. he just tried out what worked and iterated.
it's the same reason why macbooks looked so smooth, while stupid acer was still putting fan ins on the bottom of the laptop until intel gave them ultrabook designs. really? who would do that. clearly none at acer has ever used an acer laptop for actual portable usage.
typed from my acer ultraportable with fan in at the bottom