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Comment by throwawaymsft | Hacker News Reader

It seems there's a pattern in how she sees other people.

* Trying to design the Yahoo logo herself in a weekend (how hard can it be?)

* Reading a children's book to a room full of employees, to stunned silence

* Disallowing remote employees but building a nursery for her child + nanny. (Do other people get Yahoo! daycare too?)

* Requiring extensive credentials for other people [Gwyneth Paltrow better have a degree!] but not bothering with background reference checks for people she wanted (Henrique de Castro, who cost Yahoo over $100M for a year's worth of shoddy work).

Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

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"Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here."

Yes. It's often said that Steve Jobs was an asshole, but that he was an asshole for the right reasons. He was the guy in the room who cared more than anyone else. He wanted everyone else to give as much of a shit as he did, even when it came to seemingly tiny details.

I don't mean to paint a rosy, revisionist, hagiographic coat over his entire legacy, because plenty of his actions burned people in horrible ways. But when he was being micromanager-in-chief, he was usually doing it for a reason.

Dude straight up stole money from the guy who made his life possible (Steve Wosniak). Tell me the right reason for that?

He obviously wanted the Woz to care about money as much as he did. You see his generosity of spirit now?

I admire Jobs for his drive and his vision and his ability to get the best work out of amazing folks but his methods were often terribly inhuman when you really look at them.

He was the idea guy.

And we all know here how much an idea is worth.

In Apple's case - about $200BN or more. Anyone could build an iPhone. The proliferation of other platforms (Android, Windows, Ubuntu, ...) proves it. However, nobody but Steve was thinking out of the box at that time. It was just an idea (with a brilliant execution, admittedly).

First touchscreen phone was the LG Prada, not the iPhone, fyi.

And it was an amazing phone executed so well that they couldn't keep it on the shelves. /s

Seriously. Are you that dense?

Are you? Where was the thinking outside the box exactly?

There are no prizes for doing it first time. But there are prizes for doing it correctly.

Modern design with multitouch and capacitive screen, perhaps. First touchscreen phone was the IBM Simon in the mid-90s, and my Kyocera 6035 was one of many Palm/phone hybrids that predated LG by years. There were also Symbian and Windows Mobile PDA/phones.

I give more credit to Jonathan Ive on restoring Apple's place in the industry than Jobs.

As I said, "plenty of his actions burned people in horrible ways." There is no excuse for that, nor did I suggest there was. I made a pretty decent effort in the second paragraph to caveat what I'd said in the first. Steve Jobs was no saint, and he certainly doesn't get a pass for how he treated Woz (and many, many others).

(Also with a disclaimer that Steve was no saint)

Wozniak was happy to tinker and "just be an engineer at HP". Jobs pushed him to create something that could be marketed and made Woz rich.

What? He made the apple I by himself with no prodding from Steve Jobs. He was showing other people how they could make their own, and Steve convinced him to sell it. Jobs may have made him rich, I don't know how that absolves him of being an amoral thief when they weren't. I don't know that making Wozniak rich really made him any happier anyway.

You complained about Jobs stealing money from Woz. It's true, and it was a slimy move. I'm simply pointing out that the thousands of dollars stolen were monetarily ameliorated by the wealth created by Apple Computer.

And Apple computer wouldn't have happened without Jobs. Get past your hatred of the man as a person -- he was a driving force and made shit happen. Art != Artist.

>Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

It seems that Marissa's feeling was that if her users don't already like the exact same things that she likes(as a millionaire living in a fantasy world), then they should learn to start liking them.

Yes, which stems from vanity/narcissism: "I have exquisite taste, and people want to be me (a millionaire I-can-have-it-all mom/career woman), so everything must reflect my personal aesthetic."

Contrast with her hero Jobs.

It works for plenty of people. That's why professional celebrities like Kim Kardashian can become successful "fashion designers" based on their fame alone. The only caveat is that you do actually have to have good taste to be successful.

I would disagree with your conclusion there.

Unlike fragrances and clothing, nobody (very few?) chooses their email app based on a personality. The celebrity link is just too vague; it isn't "Marissa Mayer's Yahoo!", it's just Yahoo!. Even if it was, millions more people look up to Kim K or Paris H.

Also, the investment is way too high to be celeb-driven. It's easy to buy a perfume or a purse or suit or shoes because you like the link to $CELEB. But switching email providers or default search engine? Never happening.

Celebrities with fashion labels or fragrance lines don't design anything, some company that already does those things just licenses their name

Victoria Beckham is one exception to this

For example, they better like eating cake instead?

that is what worked for jobs, like to admit it or not.

he failed most products. he got a few right. he had lots of cash to burn until he got it right. He cursed anyone who wanted a tablet when he wanted the iphone.

meyer is doing the same. just didn't have the luck jobs had yet.

> Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

The word empathy to describe Steve Jobs is not the word I would use at all. Maybe "in tune"?

I would go with "lucky guess."

While I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs on account of him being a dick, I think he was right too often to just call it a 'lucky guess'. OSX, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad were all hugely successful. I don't think luck can get you that far.

> I think he was right too often to just call it a 'lucky guess'

Why not? With enough different people flipping coins there'll be somebody gets a hundred heads in a row.

Except it wasn't really a case of coin flipping.

Flipping coins suggests everybody is playing the same game with roughly equal odds.

So what is the game here? Releasing new consumer products randomly and hoping they become popular?

When Apple really broke out, PC and electronics manufacturers were still competing with one another based on spec sheets (MHz, RAM, GB, benchmarks, etc. -- whoever has more wins).

Apple went in a different direction, putting more effort into product design and user experience and marketing than its competitors. So it wasn't really a case of coin-flipping, because Apple started playing an entirely different game.

Or perhaps the coin flipping is at a higher level, e.g. trying different broad strategies to get ahead (like putting greater emphasis on design/UX)? Again, nobody else was really trying new strategies, everyone was playing the specs sheet arms race. So, in this case, there weren't enough people flipping coins to invoke the metaphor.

And let's not forget all of the work he put into tilting the odds in favor of success- such as convincing the music industry to change their business model. To say he had some sort of special genius for aesthetics isn't really fair- he also was very strategic. That may be the part the Ms. Mayer hasn't caught up to yet.

.5 ^ 100 is 7e-31. If everyone in the world did nothing but flip coins all day long, how many years before you would expect to see 100 heads in a row?

Generally speaking, I don't admire Jobs all that much. But comparing SJ to MM is really closer to an April's fool joke.

The problem is that she is not a founder but behaves like one.

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