Steve Jobs, a Genius at Pushing Boundaries

And every time there's an article about Steve Jobs someone posts this comment as if they are the first/only person to think of it. It came up many times at the time they passed.

It's obvious why Steve Jobs gets more mainstream attention; he was the face of a company that has a daily presence in millions of people's lives.

Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy are not known for the same reason that Georges Friedel (or anyone else involved in the development of LCDs) is not known. Poeple aren't interested in engineers, and engineers aren't usually interested in being public figures.

The list of engineers and scientists whose contributions were absolutely fundamental and necessary to the existence of an iPhone is literally thousands of people. Do you really expect everyone to know all these names? No.

You know Ritchie and McCarthy because you are interested in programming and UNIX. A chemical engineer would know someone else that you don't know. Your knowledge is not superior to someone else's. It's what you're interested in vs. what they are interested in.

Come on, this is obvious. Why do otherwise smart people think this is a good question?

> Will the NYT write an article about Ritchie or McCarthy?

You mean like these ones?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html

And every single time I see an article about Jobs accompanied by a set of comments from a tech-savvy audience I see this same comment about Ritchie (and sometimes McCarthy) resurfacing. You can continue feeling sour about it, but not everyone deserving attention receives as much as they should, and not everyone receiving attention deserves it as much as they get. Ritchie's and McCarthy's personalities and accomplishments just aren't as interesting to the general public as Jobs', which has little to do with our definition of success but more with the fact that, to be able to obsess over someone, we need them and their work to speak to our imagination, which is a lot harder when their accomplishments are less trivial to understand without any knowledge on their field of study.

1. Everyone stands on someone else's shoulders.

2. People like Steve (or Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Larry and Sergey...) bring together teams of people and lots of money on a problem.

3. The "lone genius" is great but leaders who bring tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment over their lifetime usually can have a greater impact. By getting consumers to pay, you can continue to fund even better products. Mobile technology will make great strides in the next decade because Steve Jobs planted the seed. Hopefully, Elon, for example, will eventually get to an electric car with a 500 mile range and rockets that make weekly trips to Mars.

4. Leaders like Steve find solutions to problems. When he worked on the Macintosh, the developers used 68k assembler. At NeXT he went with Objective C because that's what his developers wanted. If Eiffel had been more popular they might have gone with that. Using Unix was cool but if a good solution didn't exist, they could have copied Amiga OS. :-)

Even Ritchie and McCarthy might not have been able to achieve as much without other people's contributions. Clearly they didn't start out with sticks and stones. Even Einstein could've been useless if people before him hadn't laid down the required framework. He was just standing on the top of a human pyramid. The problem is that we only look at the guy standing at the top.

The mere idea of 'hero-worship' is flawed. Leads to dangerous consequences. Why do we forget the contributions of all those who were never named?! Nobody here can go very far on his own. I think it is high time we realized that all this was not built by one man or a few 'heroes'.

PS: I don't think the article describes Jobs as a great guy.

I see this opinion expressed so often when people talk about Steve Jobs and just how good he was at what he did.

That second part is just it, by the way. He was fantastic at what he did. Why does it matter that what he did was built off of things done by others? Dennis Ritchie, John McCarthy and Steve Jobs were all brilliant (and, by the way, am sure all of them used things also built by others while still being brilliant). The reason the world knows more about Steve Jobs than the other two is just obvious - he was the face of a company that build physical things people knew and recognised that they used every day. Steve Jobs was a brilliant marketer that orchestrated that a company be known by people and that he also be well know. That is why articles are published so often about him and not the other two.

TL;DR Why does it matter that Steve Jobs wouldn't have been successful without also using things created by others? That is true for every successful person. Who here knows who invented the electric guitar? Unfortunately, I don't. But I do know who Jimi Hendrix was and know that he was fantastic at playing it.

EDIT: Typo :)

- Sent from my iPad

It’s the same reason rock stars are more famous than scientists.

>To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything interesting.*

I have to disagree with this. You have absolutely no idea or proof what Steve Jobs would have done without Ritchie or McCarthy. Your entire line of reasoning is predicated on unprovable assumption. For all we know, Steve Jobs still would have been successful without Ritchie and McCarthy and that's why he's a more interesting figure. But that scenario is just as impossible to prove as yours.

God, I get tired of answering idiots like you. Geeks live in their own little world. Yes, those other guys should definitely be admired. I'll write up a better answer in another post because I'm basing calling you a clueless idiot, and you know what happens to those posts. :-)

Anyway, it really is important for geeks to get a clue about how the world works, and understand what business guys like Steve bring to the world.

I agree with you, and at the same time I'm a little saddened by this reality. Yes Job was responsible for some really nice gadgets that changed people's lives, but at some point the benefits are outweighed by the opportunity cost of competition that would have possibly led to even better gadgets. To be clear, I don't think we often get to that "point" today, but it is a risk worth asking ourselves as a public.

While the various trust violations and other assholery bumped up Apple's profits, they hardly provide enough benefit on their own to be responsible for Apple's success.

Unless we find out that Steve Jobs went around holding a gun to people's heads to force everyone to buy iPods, iPhones and iPads.

I hope this isn't the only way to govern to be very successful.

Telecom companies do the same stuff as far as pushing the limits of the law and they are pretty universally reviled. Apple is successful because it provides things to people that they really want and like.

That would be convenient to some world views around HN but the hardware speaks for itself.

I would definitely tend to think its more towards pushing the limits of the law.

Didn't he get a salary of $1 a year without any backfire while CEOs of smaller companies tried it and got fined?

Indeed it is. If anyone has suggestions about what we could do about this, beyond not have shallowly provocative articles to begin with, we'd love to hear them.

What an utterly obnoxious way to frame the issue.