His reportedly preferred means of achieving it: legendary abuse, ever changing requirements, pop "explain your job in the lift or you're fired" quizzes and removal of choice for consumers (when it suited his tastes) is simply repugnant. Who knows how many engineer's sanity, awesome hacks or creative careers his vision quest cost?
I am not downplaying his accomplishments -- I'm saying that giving Jobs credit for what Apple accomplished is like giving credit to dust in the air for a rainstorm and acting as though that's the only way a rainstorm could happen.
The iPhone happened because thousands of engineers threw themselves into a machine and ground themselves into a fine mist in order to produce it to Jobs's deadline and ever changing liking. We almost certainly would've had it or something like it -- with or without Jobs and his imminently destructive vision.
Jobs didn't invent the iPhone from whole cloth, fully formed. He didn't magick up a whole new product category or new approach. At best, he (or more likely his market research team) extrapolated market demand. Palm and other feature phone manufacturers had been trending towards what the iPhone would become for years.
Apple simply happened to be first to market and arrived with a barely passable product. The real innovation, the app store, was not a launch item. If I recall correctly, the web browser was supposed to be the future and was the only way for third-party "applications" to run on the device at launch. There is zero reason to think that vision was singular or complete.
Jobs is not and never was a role model. He succeeded in spite of his flaws, not because of them -- or because of some ineffable genius.
I suspect you have never even seen a Microsoft CE phone.
Who do you think negotiated with the record labels? Hollywood?
Hate to say it but engineers that aren't pointed to a goal and kept on task are worse than useless.
Go ask anyone about Nokia, RIM and even the once mighty IBM and Microsoft how good is lots of engineers if they are blind and directionless.
Jobs set out to change the world, and did for a while.
Now professional users are shunned with 5+ year old machines at full retail.
Microsoft - they were invested in making a Windows based phone.
Google - the first concept of Android was a BlackBerry like device.
RIM - RIM was poo pooing the idea of a touch screen phone two or three years after the iPhone was out.
The App Store wasn't really that much of an innovation. The carriers had app stores selling downloadable J2ME apps before the iPhone came out. I was on Sprint back then.
Well, it's easy to say this after-the-facts. The iPhone in my opinion was a HUGE gamble, and also in my opinion, was successful due to a stagnant smart/cell phone market and the desire to bring internet to the mobile world. The first iPhone provided a fast HTML+CSS+Javascript-enabled browser out of the box, albeit with severe limitations, no external apps, no 3G. Nevertheless Jobs had the luck to launch the iPhone at the right time, when no other manifacturer was daring to do that. And it was clear, when shortly after iPhone announcement, several other manifacturers released similar looking devices (Blackberry Storm, Nokia 5800)
How do you know? Were you there? With each Steve Jobs story I read he seems less of a genius (though I never was in the "Steve Jobs is a genius" camp) and more like a mad man with incredible luck.
That word is Woz. If Jobs had not met him, he (Jobs) would have died penniless and alone.
Jobs - the Mac, Next, Pixar, iPod, iPhone, iPad, the physical Apple Stores....
Woz - the first universal programmable remote.
Woz - Breakout for Atari, the first universal programmable remote, the Apple I, and so on
Jobs - ... (had a strong opinion about buttons and money he made off of Wozniak's inventions and his ability to sell them)
An idea is nothing without execution. Jobs proved that he could successfully change multiple industries (animation, music, mobile) without Woz. None of Woz’s ventures have been a success without Jobs.
If it was so easy, why couldn’t anyone else in the PC industry do it including companies that were in a much stronger position when Jobs came back in 1997?
Even in the animation business, Disney could barely produce a hit while Pixar was producing a string of successes.
Dell (just in time supply chain design and driving the cost of the PC down), Pixar (not related to Jobs until acquisition, certainly not driven by him), Woz (breakout was certainly a success - Jobs was assigned to build the prototype at Atari and essentially stole a large part of Woz's compensation and even then Woz is given credit for the design alongside Bushnell; in a sense it was assigned to Jobs essentially because he was Woz's friend) are all counter examples to your statements.
In 1997, anything computer related was experiencing the dot-com boom. It would've been hard to screw up Apple's increasing valuation then, for anyone.
Dell never shipped as many products in their heyday that Apple was shipping by 2010. No one would ever say that Dells logistics were better than Tim Cooks even when shipping 50 million iPods a year, let alone iPhones.
Pixar was bought from Lucas and their grand ambition was to make special effects for other movies and commercials. Definitely not to make full length theatrically released movies.
In 1997, the Internet was the big thing, but not Apple. Apple was near bankruptcy and didn’t announce its first profit until 2001.
Breakout netted Jobs around $3000 from the stories that were told. Not exactly billionaire material.
That said, I do grant that Jobs certainly had skill in gathering the right people and ensuring things got done.
What I abhor is the manor in which that was accomplished and the canonisation of Jobs as an individual singularly responsible for everything created by Apple without regard to the hard, bloody work of the hidden legions of staff and burnt out engineers beneath him.
For me, personally, the human cost of Jobs's methods far far outweighed the value of what was created; especially when it was likely to have been arrived at independently by others through less destructive methods.
Why couldn’t Microsoft, RIM, Motorola, Google or Nokia do something similar to the iPhone?
Even today, with dozens of companies making Android phones, none can create a phone compelling enough that people are willing to pay enough for to make them profitably.
But as far as what Jobs did with iTunes, Bill Gates himself praised Jobs....
https://gizmodo.com/5468666/microsoft-knew-they-got-burned-w...
Steve Jobs ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.
This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better Licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music.
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Apple without regard to the hard, bloody work of the hidden legions of staff and burnt out engineers beneath him.
All of the “burnt out engineers” who worked on the original iPhone could easily write their own ticket for the rest of their life. Given a choice between being able to say that I worked on the original iPhone and that I did yet another software as a service CRUD app, I would much rather have been able to say I worked on the original iPhone.
The iPhone launched around June 2007, iirc. The T-Mobile G1 launched around September of 2008. The iPhone did not receive an App Store until v2 of the device a year later. Android launched with all core functionality.
I think it's safe to safe that if they had waited until the product was fully baked -- they would've launched at about the exact same time.
I don't really care what Bill Gates's opinion of Steve Jobs is, his opinions don't hold much weight with me.
As to burnt-out engineers "writing their own ticket" ... well, if they're tired of working at a place like Apple -- I seriously doubt they'd enjoy working for a place that wants to be just like them and hires people with a history of working there in an attempt to emulate them.
Saying the Nomad - a larger player that used a 3.5 inch hard drive, with a worse interface was “just like the iPod” so not gets why the iPod was better it’s actually a famous Slashdot Meme on why geeks can’t release great products.
“No wireless, less space than a Nomad...lame”
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
As far as the G1 coming out a year after the iPhone and would have come out about the same time, you don’t know the history of Android. Android was originally designed to be an BlackBerry clone. After the iPhone came out, they completely went back to the drawing board.
https://www.technobuffalo.com/2011/10/27/android-before-and-...
Also, yes, the iPod was lame. It was worse than the nomad in many many technical respects. Now, what the iPod did have over the nomad was the only best-of-class thing Apple has ever sold - the perception of cool. It was smaller, it was silver and white... it had one button (well, later anyway...).
Apple tech is very much a fashion accessory in addition to being a technical instrument but that does not make it visionary or superior. Often, quite the opposite (butterfly keyboard failures, poorly spec'd expensive pro everything, insufficient flawed VRM design on the latest core i9 macbook, etc etc). However, the superior product, in the functional sense, doesn't always win in the market place.
Actually, now that I think about it, Apple is not really a tech company; they're a fashion company that makes products who's primary purpose is as a technical fashion accessory. It performs its purported function perfunctorily, if not unreliably or begrudgingly and, of course, if it can't do something or doesn't work right you shouldn't have wanted to do it at all ("you're holding it wrong"). However, what it's real function, what it is best at, is permitting membership to a cool kids club - the club of owning and displaying Apple products.
When you think about it like that, their attitude, the lacklustre functionality of their products in deference to appearance, and the behaviour of their customers makes much more sense.
Jobs reportedly acted far more like a stereotypical fashion designer out of a fantasy than a reasonable human being or typical Tech-firm CEO.
Granted, perhaps a stereotypical fashion designer who's never really sewn competently in their life nor can design by drawing up real plans for others to build. But, of course, they've had armies of competent fashion engineers working themselves to the bone to produce design after design and the designer really knows what they like, once they see it anyway, maybe, so there's that. Naturally, nobody cares about where those plans come from and at what cost - it only matters that the blessed one chose them as the true way.
Apple is very much like a Warholian art factory, now without a Warhol; but I digress.
It's no wonder firms trying to imitate Apple fail. Apple doesn't have to be superior or right - they just have to play cool. The perception of cool is built by luck and timing and maintained by luck and skill. Jobs was an outlier in these areas, and so, we see the exception rather than the rule. Jobs and Apple are little more than anomalies maintained by the efforts of a cast of millions, the public included.
Ah, and it all falls into place. There's no point to arguing with people who have bought into Apple or the Jobs myths. One may as well debate the meaning of Duchamp's Fountain in the context of the semiconductor. It's pointless masturbation with little to no possibility of real change or outcome other than increasing local entropy, for these people have already chosen willingly the Apple option - to think different, as it were.
And with that, I resign from this particular thread of discussion knowing that at the least I have explained and explored why I feel so strongly with regards to the façade Jobs built in Apple and its influence on how people both see and do not see the manipulation beyond the technical in technical products.
A suitable explanation for myself, at least, if no one else.
This was no secret that Google retooled the entire Android form factor after the iPhone came out. This story has been told a million times.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Also, yes, the iPod was lame. It was worse than the nomad in many many technical respects. Now, what the iPod did have over the nomad was the only best-of-class thing Apple has ever sold - the perception of cool. It was smaller, it was silver and white... it had one button (well, later anyway...).
And this is why geeks (not an insult, I proudly consider myself a geek) who think like Woz will never bring a successful product to market. The Nomad was a big bulky portable device with a large 3.5 inch hard drive, a slower transfer mechanism than FireWire, less battery life, and a clunky method of transferring files.
By the time the iPod became popular in 2004, iPod + iTunes was a easy way to get music on a device that consumers enjoyed.
Actually, now that I think about it, Apple is not really a tech company; they're a fashion company that makes products who's primary purpose is as a technical fashion accessory.
You realize that Apple has the best ARM processor designers in the industry?
If all Apple has is “cool” tech then why is the rest of the industry failing? All of the computer manufacturers that were around 20 years ago are either dead or barely surviving, the phone manufacturers are not doing much better.
Like the old saying goes, “if they are so smart, why aren’t they rich”?
This term "luck" is often abused in the gaming world. "I wasn't lucky" is a bullshit excuse to deal with bad RNG. You work around bad RNG and make the best of it. Calling others lucky is a way to deal with envy. "It isn't my lack of skill, he was just lucky."
Personally, from what I gathered Jobs had some severe flaws which are fairly well documented in the movie made about him. Consider for example the way he dealt with his child (Lisa). Its interesting to learn more of his personality in his youth (same with e.g. Holmes, Gates, or any person of interest who seems flawed). Steve Jobs used LSD. Steve Jobs did phreaking together with Steve Wozniak. They even sold blue boxes.
We don't need to be there to know that there are a lot of assholes like SJ around. But none of them shipped the iPhone.
Emulating that part of SJ is easy and is done in several places. But that was not all he did
Link: https://stratechery.com/2013/steve-jobs-at-macworld-boston-i...
You are ignoring the whole other side of him that made him effective and revolutionary: His vision of the future was second to none.
It doesn't make Steve - or people who act like Steve - in the right. But his genius wasn't just pissing off a bunch of people to get them to "trauma bond." The iPhone didn't get made that way.