Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri...
> The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.
BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS.
But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't.
Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS:
• best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder
• Steve Jobs.
No contest, I'm afraid.
Even if personally I preferred BeOS.
Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.
As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again.
Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection.
Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection.
A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries.
Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't.
This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable.
OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.
My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.
A good track record maybe necessary but is clearly insufficient.
Having said that - ironically - Job himself wasn't exactly an obviously successful CEO prior to his return to Apple. He'd been fired from Apple previously, NeXT was one of many workstation manufactures and less successful than many direct competitors (eg Silicon Graphics).
Eric Schmidt is another example. Prior to Google he was CEO at Novell where (quoting Wikipedia): "He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much less profitable."
Let me put it another way. Can we reasonably assume that people who find themselves in the position of needing to hire a CEO with their own money are not complete morons and will spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it?
I'm lost. The original question was:
Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.
Your response was "A candidate has to have a track record of success."
People are pointing out that doesn't appear to be sufficient.
So I agree that people hiring CEOs aren't morons and think about it. But I'm still not sure what indicators are useful outside track record, or indeed if you think that is sufficient.
I didn't say it was sufficient. For example, if I say "an airplane has to have wings" would you argue that isn't all it needs? Of course not.
There's a reason that English has the words "all", "only", etc. For example, there's a difference between "people like hamburgers" and "all people like hamburgers." There's a difference between "choosy people choose cheese" and "only choosy people choose cheese." English is not a programming language.
I suggest interpreting my messages from a presumption that neither am I a moron nor are people who select executives.
You've said "A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how", but every question people have raised to try and identify additional points the response hasn't really added any additional information.
If your point that "people who [successfully] select CEOs" have some additional criteria that they use (outside the track record) then: Yes! Great!
What is it?