The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a market that Apple, Microsoft and many others had several attempts at cracking.
It's very easy to assume someone is brilliant if you assume they didn't go through the same iterations that everyone else did. Iterations of trial and error before hitting upon brilliance.
Jobs was great at marketing. He had some great people work under him. But he also had plenty of swing and misses too. I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early than most CEOs but I don't think that's true either.
As with every idea, it must have evolved as people worked on other stuff. In the case of iPhone, we know how it came to existence, it is a story told countless times.
Didn't Nokia had R&D department? Of course they did and I'm sure that they also had brilliant designers and engineers who did amazing work. They simply lacked a Steve Jobs to weed out and steer their work to make it whole. In my opinion, Nokia failed due to poor leadership but not poor talent. Once Nokia was gone, the talent pool in Finland transformed and once again managed to do great things and be a hotspot.
In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to abandone whatever they are doing and started competing with Apple a few years later.
Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship.
I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in.
That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.
That’s not overstating things either.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.
what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too.
Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.
Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time (Steve Ballmer reaction*)
Although they make great objects of desire, Toyota is no Tesla, Nokia is no Apple.
Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis.
Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.
Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prior art for each thing existed at the time of the thing we identify in retrospect as "the invention". The singular-genius model of invention is essentially never correct.
As smartphones go, the iPhone's specific instantiation was remarkable, but the idea was in the gestalt. Apple had shipped the ROKR already, and lots of people (myself included) looked at the then-current color iPod and said "boy, it would be great if this were my phone, too". So there was lots of speculation about the idea, years before it became real. It wasn't at all surprising that a smartphone would emerge. Jobs even made a joke about it during the original iPhone launch presentation (there was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial on it).
That's not to say that there weren't lots of innovative things about the iPhone, just that the claim that "no one ever expected" it isn't really true.
You have a higher probability of being rich if your ancestors "owned the land" first. Similarly, you have a higher probability of being rich if you "created" the market.
Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.
But the land was always there, and we were always going to continue miniaturizing computers. How big a slice of the pie is fair?
Full text here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/george-progress-and-povert...
Blurbs from famous people who enjoyed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty#Notable_r...
edit to add because a link to a book is not a discussion:
> Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.
Landowners "deserve" all the value that comes out of their "stewardship" (i.e. improvements, developments, labor), and none of the value that is inherent to the land or location (i.e. the value of being located in a city center, or the value of natural resources). In practical terms, this would mean a just policy is one that levies zero taxation on anything the owner does on the land, and levies a full tax on the value of natural resources and locational advantage inherent to a plot (calculable as the market clearing rental value of the land minus any developments).
The same holds for having ideas first. Inventions are insightful combinations of natural facts, but they are closer to discovery than true creation (we don't create the laws of physics that underlie every patentable mechanism). To lay exclusive claim to a discovery and wield it as a tool to fight competitors is anti-progress. All inventors have the claim to the fruits of their labor, but not at the exclusion of any other independent human to have and utilize ideas of their own.
One can think of an organisation as 'development' on top of land (the market). So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me.
That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land' (laws of physics, existence of GSM networks?). There is certainly nothing 'natural' about the capital structure of companies in the USA that ensures some people become billionaires, nor even that for profit companies are the right way to organise. Although I might be a fish trying to explain away water there.
I get the feeling that if Swardley maps might be useful in laying out a taxation policy we are going down the wrong route however, as I seem to be arguing that each 'layer' from land to transport netowrks to digital networks needs to be accounted for to get the fair level of taxation.
> So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me. [...] That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land'
Exactly right. Which is why none of those improvements should be taxed. They are the product of human labor, to which the laborer has full rights. It is only the common natural resources which an organization monopolizes at the exclusion of others that should be taxed. A tax on such limited resources is in effect a fee that they pay for the private utilization of a public good. Ownership of high value locations is one example, intellectual patents are another. If you squint, a carbon tax is another example.
It doesn't have to get as complicated as Wardley maps. You don't need to account for every layer of improvement in the network of modern business, because no improvement should be taxed. You only need to answer "is this the product of human ingenuity and labor, or is this a natural common good that is owned to the exclusion of anyone else?"
This is the polar opposite of a VAT. You don't want to tax "value add", you want to tax "natural resource use"!
Google's search is a utility with far less squinting
Is an Aqueduct natural common good? Is the water flowing through it? what happens with open source software?
I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"
Not the online store. The land taken up by their supply chain, offices, and datacenters is all they are excluding others from using.
> Google's search is a utility with far less squinting
It's a valuable service, but because the service was built by humans, it should belong fully to those who built it. I don't see a justification for taxing the output of someone's labor just because it is popular. What they should give back to society is what they have taken from society, again the land that their office buildings and datacenters take up.
There is a more nuanced point about the natural monopolies of certain businesses due to network effects and economies of scale, but it's better to read the book for a full treatment, I can't do it justice.
> Is an Aqueduct natural common good?
I don't see why. It's built by human hands, designed by human engineers. The land the aqueduct takes up, and the reservoir of water it draws from are natural common goods, of course.
> what happens with open source software?
Software is very interesting. It is the output of labor clearly, but ideas are part of the public domain (ideas are there in nature to be discovered, anyone can discover an idea). If you package a set of open ideas into a service, I don't think anyone else has a claim on that service than you.
> I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"
Land is not just land. "The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities". Land is one of the three unique factors of production, along with labor and capital, it is everything that is not the product of human labor. (Labor is labor, and capital is the stored product of labor put to use to create more wealth)
Some pictures from inside, including one concept integrated with a telephone handset: https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/798542140435480576
They co-created GSM! Both the specification and then deploying the first GSM network too. Nokia basically invented how cell phones work. I'd say that was little more involved than taking something that was already available.
Which is ironic because the iPhone was exactly what you described about Nokia: existing technology. Apple did a fantastic job putting it together. The form, feel and entire UX is top notch. But Apple didn't invent new technology to create the iPhone - they very much stood on the shoulders of giants.
> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time
The iPhone was far more evolutionary than the first ever cell phone. By the time the iPhone was in development there was already smart phones, feature phones, PDAs and tablets on the market that lead some weight about what worked and what didn't. There were design documents published about UX too. And thus there were a few similar devices in R&D from different companies at the time, all converging on a similar UX as the iPhone. So I'd argue the iPhone was only unexpected if you weren't already paying attention to the way the market was heading.
> *Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis. Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.*
That's a grossly unfair comment. In fact, at risk of being blunt: it's ridiculous and petty.
If you want to understand Woz a little more then I'd suggest you read into what Woz is doing with his time now and why he left Apple.
Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing.
And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple.
But in interviews he was also sort of a student-philosopher of decision-making. Witness the clip on this page, with Jobs talking about being taught about not interfering with brand design (in this case the NeXT brand) by Paul Rand:
https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand
You can see that made an impression on him and probably got absorbed into his sort of precision-anecdote-driven way of communicating his ideas.
(The other thing I like about this clip is seeing Jobs talking quite personally about someone he admires)
When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?
Nokia phones went one way, iPhone went a different way.
When someone says “I’m very competitive,” I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people.
That is a very nice way of putting it. Thank You.
This oversells what Apple did and undersells just how much Nokia dropped the ball. Nokia wasn’t blindsided by the iPhone or touch screen interfaces. They knew about touchscreen interfaces and actively chose not to persue it. “Because people want tactile keyboards” essentially they Listened to much to their own engineers who were in love with blackberries. While Apple mindlessly perused a vision that notably had already failed them once in the Newton, and which every business major would say was a suicide mission “because the iPhone will canibalice the iPod market”.
The reason Nokia failed was because management was just horribly bad. Not only did they have 500 different models of phones with every team competing internally, the were proud of it.
Apple went out with “we have one phone and one phone only” at that time. And Nokia engineers laughed them off saying “how the hell will they ever complete with us, they have just one phone!?”, and of cause they also laughed at the price point, saying that trying to sell expensive phones in North America was concept that was dead at birth. No, to them true market dominance was to sell cheap phones in India and China.
On the engineering side, that point in time was also when Nokia had extremely shitty software, again this wasn’t a mistake, they were proud of it. The N95 had like 4 different menu systems to reach the same screens. The iPhone didn’t do much before it had the web and apps, but it was simple, people intuitively understood it. But Nokia didn’t care. They didn’t even consider Apple a competitor even after iPhone started to gain popularity. They didn’t care about the high end market segment and only cared about Google as a competitor.
He certainly spent a lot of time thinking about his own thoughts; trying to express them, trying to revise them. Like he was his own life's work in a way. It's a skill in itself isn't it?
Aka Blue Ocean product/market strategy.
Basically, rather than being a shark swimming in a ocean that is colored red from the blood of all the other sharks competing, you leave and find a blue ocean.
Sounds good on paper but sometimes that market is much smaller, and/or just being the first-to-market doesn't guarantee you'll be successful.
Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most.
Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers". I think Steve Jobs is an example of it. Even if Steve Jobs said he was competing, Apple rarely competed and won on equal terms under Steve Jobs. He had always maintained a startup mentality, instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. IMHO, his leadership style was exactly what it takes to drive bunch of brilliant people into the jungle where the great riches are hidden but he was no match to Tim Cook as a CEO.
To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. It's probably because he was one of those who made what we have today but if you forget that for a moment he sounds like a time traveler from the 2000s explaining the value of computers to regular folks from the 70s.
What an extraordinary man.