What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).
Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of Graham Chapman:
[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather, the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python
Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable, complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of surrounding yourself with great people and getting them all working together is underrated.
Even if Steve Jobs contributed nothing to the ideas that were developed (which is unlikely, based on what I've heard), he still deserves the praise for being the human gravitational well that pulled all those people to work together and create awesome products.
Jobs himself has said what Apple (and he) has compared to others is "taste." I believe that to be true.
In relation to the human side (leading people), what Jobs has going for him is "judgement."
The older I get, the thing that attracts me to certain leaders is good judgement. Without that, a leader is a manager and not a very good one.
Link? IIRC the term "iPod" was intended to be used for another product that may have preceeded Jobs' return but I this is the first I've heard about a portable mp3 player being developed at Apple before Jobs came back.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-more-th...
Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.
Sure, there were predecessors and prototypes. Sure, he had a ton of help. I count more than 3 decades of contribution so far. How many times does he have to be at the helm of a fundamental change before we stop having this discussion?
Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.
Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...
That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.
Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)
The functional design of the iPhone was a surprise to no one, everyone wanted it, Apple delivered.
There are many operating system, but OSX is still an asset to Apple.
It may be the case that Apple has great ideas, but they certainly have great execution.
I still think that Steve Jobs is cool, though.
that's not true..
This probably doesn't need repeating, but there are a lot of hackers out there who appreciate a UNIX OS that works out of the box, runs commercial software not available on Linux, and can easily sync with your iPhone.
It's all the small unintuitive things, like "x" doesn't close the application. There are no hints for accomplishing basic tasks like renaming a file or moving a file (Finder doesn't do cut, only copy). And so on... I consider myself experienced with computers, but on OS X I have to google how to accomplish the most basic tasks.
Really, please try it. You know, explain it to the kind of person who has to write down every step on paper. (Not that my mum is that bad - actually I have her on Ubuntu and she is doing fine). So that person has to write down "don't close the application with x, use cmd+q" - it's ridiculous.
Gestures look great in presentations - but how do you learn them? There are no hints in OS X as to what to use (OK, I can remember pinching and scrolling - but I don't resize pictures much, so guess what, it is not THAT helpful after all).
It's fine if people love their OS X (for whatever reason), but the claim that OS X is simpler is definitely not true.
By the way, the "unintuitive" things you mention aren't unintuitive, just different from Windows. It's no less "unintuitive" than whether or not you set your parking brake with a pedal or a hand lever (so better not get your mum a Toyota if she has a Ford).
By the way, OS X is good enough at multitasking and memory allocation you don't have to actually quit your applications. It's sufficient to just close the window. That way it starts up faster when you want to use it again.
As for not closing apps, I find that hard to believe. Maybe if you only ever use 3 apps it is OK. Otherwise, why even have a mechanism for starting and stopping apps? Could just start them all upon booting. (Actually this will probably be the future, but not yet).
Also it is very confusing if you have closed all windows of an app, but not the app itself. Because then if you click the app icon, nothing happens (it is already started, after all).
If you close all the windows of an app, clicking the app icon in the Dock usually opens a new window. It does for Safari at least. Anyway, the main difference is that Windows doesn't consistently differentiate between windows and applications, and Mac does. On the Mac side, a window is just something that's opened up by an application as an interface, whereas on Windows, the window is the application, which is why if you need to open more than one browser window you have multiple instances of Microsoft Internet Explorer running, but it's really okay because secretly they're all running off the same DLL's. Or something like that.
That's because many OS X applications are document-based apps. All windows are either documents, or are meant for directly manipulating one single document. The 'X' is supposed to close the document, not the application. Applications in which the document-based approach does not work (Songbird, for example) will automatically quit when you close the last window. This is perfectly intuitive behavior for people who have been using Macs for a long time. Just because Windows does it differently (and Linux copies it blindly) does not mean it's the One True Way. In fact, I'd kill to get document-based apps in Linux and Windows.
> There are no hints for accomplishing basic tasks like renaming a file or moving a file. (Finder doesn't do cut, only copy)
You have a point here. I'd give anything to get 'Cut' in the Finder. But, then again, Finder is the second worst piece of software in OS X (the worst being iTunes).
You make it sound as if Apple PCs are beyond comparison, a class of their own. Which they aren't. I am not saying they are not good (another discussion), but I don't see the supposed revolutionary part.
The amount of time people have to waste on PCs waiting for the OS, doing anti virus stuff, staring at blue screens of death, rebooting because it's got confused, etc etc
But this isn't an OS war thread :) Suffice to say, "It's still just a PC" is completely missing the point. A top class restaurant still 'just' serves food, but you can't really compare it to Macdonalds.
And to many people, Apple are in a class of their own. If I didn't currently use a macbook, I'm not really sure what else I would use. Some of the Asus laptops look ok enough (At least like cheap copies of Apple design), and maybe Ubuntu is getting mature enough on the desktop to be useful, but there's not an obvious alternative.
Regarding "I don't see the revolutionary part", you don't have to be revolutionary to be better than everything else. People use Apple stuff because it works and is well thought out. It stays out of their way and lets them achieve what they want to. It's designed to make everything as seamless and useful for the user as is possible.
Some people just want a car to get them from A to B. So they buy a standard boring crappy Ford or something that looks like a dog. As long as it gets them from A to B, they're ok. Others actually love the 'driving' bit, and enjoy it, as well as having a thing of beauty. So they buy a better car. Same is true with computers (And most other things).
Just saying, the "easier to use, no rebooting, no blue screens of deaths" are a complete marketing fabrication. Except that on OS X the death screens are not blue.
Edit: as for your edited part - I am not saying Apple PCs are bad (holding my opinion back), but the article made it out as if they are revolutionary. That is what I am arguing against.
My personal experience:
Windows/dos user for 10 years Linux user for the next 10 years OSX for last 3 years or so
From my experience, the last 3 years has been my most productive, and I've spent far far far far less time messing about doing unuseful things (Trying to get wifi working, trying to work around OS issues etc).
Don't just dismiss everything as 'fanboyism', I used to do that 10 years ago. I thought Mac users were rich pretentious egotistical people who didn't actually know anything about computers.
Also, it is not really fair to compare Apple to all the other PC vendors out there. Some of them probably produce crappy machines, but others don't.
One of the key things that puts Apple in a different class though is that they create the hardware AND the software. That's a big bonus and gets rid of a ton of potential hickups.
I didn't even imply that Macs are better. Although I do think that Apple controlling the hardware and software has allowed them a lot more time to focus on the software than the bureaucracy Microsoft has to deal with to help software publishers and PC manufacturers. There is a lot of stuff I can only do on Windows and that in itself is important to note.
The world would be a better place.
The hardware? Some has been good. Some really advanced to their time. Some G4Cube-ish.
I have to admit the guy is brilliant.