I say this as a fan of Steve Jobs.
Yes.
The amount of research thrown into the likes of a Ferrari end up trickling all the way down to your regular car. From tyre compounds to suspension design to chassis structure to aerodynamics to engine optimization, your daily car would be nowhere as safe, economical, durable and so on without cutting edge technology designed for those ultra high-end cars. I had a nasty car crash that would simply have reduced me to bits ten years ago, but survived with only a few bruises and a bunch of displaced vertebrae. I could have escaped the crash altogether had the car been a couple of years less, and had been equipped with ESP. It would have been impossible to fit such amount of technology in such a cheap and lightweight package without bringing cutting-edge technology and perfect realization to the table at some point, but that comes with an awfully high price tag which can only be afforded by consumer luxury segment and professional racing. R&D in automotive consumes absolutely unfathomable and ridiculous amounts of money.
So yes, a F458, a Corvette ZR1, a Honda NSX-R, a Zonda Cinque, a Bugatti Veyron, an Aston-Martin One-77, a Porsche GT3 RS, a Nissan GT-R, a Tesla Roadster are vehicles of perfection that bring something to the table for society as a whole.
Then I would say that the designer of that car had contributed to society.
People forget what phones looked like in 2006. My parents now both have smart phones that look a lot like iPhones (but aren't) that they spend hours using a day. Like him or not, you can't argue Steve Jobs didn't have a huge impact on modern society.
Jef Raskin said these things in regards to the Macintosh project:
"What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down."
"After he took over, Jobs came up with the story about the Mac project being a 'pirate operation.' We weren't trying to keep the project away from Apple, as he later said; we had very good ties with the rest of Apple. We were trying to keep the project away from Jobs' meddling. For the first two years, Jobs wanted to kill the project because he didn't understand what it was really all about."
"I was very much amused by the recent Newsweek article where he [Jobs] said, 'I have a few good designs in me still.' He never had any designs. He has not designed a single product. Woz designed the Apple II. Ken Rothmuller and others designed Lisa. My team and I designed the Macintosh. Wendell Sanders designed the Apple III. What did Jobs design? Nothing."
The Issacson Analysis (backed up by Atkinson) was that Raskin had envisioned an underpowered, less expensive system that would not have had many of the features that made the original Macintosh "Insanely Great."
I like Gladwell's analysis - Jobs was a great _editor_ He didn't necessarily create very much, but he was driven to relentlessly critique until something great emerged.
It's amazing how valuable a function that can be, particularly in the presences of great engineers who can rise to the challenge.
The reason people praise Steve Jobs is not because he designed anything (though he may have had a few design suggestions) - but because his singular drive to release great products resulted in so many being created (and then, quite logically, being copied by everyone else)
The Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad all came about because of Steve Jobs, and have changed the technology that we use every day. Love him, or Hate him, you can't take that away from him.
Or may be if Raskin was able to had it his way, we would Apple would have brought a PC to nearly every home and has as much impact to the society as MS had. We can only guess (and not even guesstimate) what would have happened if Jobs weren't there in this particular project.
> It's amazing how valuable a function that can be, particularly in the presences of great engineers who can rise to the challenge - Yes exactly. One of the major issues is that the Engineers are been given very less credit. Jobs was the editor, the face of APPL and not the creator. The current trend is to attribute all the success of Apple to just Jobs and no one else. I am not aware if they were actually great designers, developers and engineers under him or was it him alone who single handedly guided dumb sheep into greatness. Most of the Job praises after his death tend to point towards the latter, which is unfair if not wrong.
If I'm not wrong, Raskin's I'd say "anti-vision" consisted of no GUI, no mouse, basically a kind of machine that even predated PC-s (capable of even less, but therefore being simpler to use). Jobs wanted more than anywhere existed and still having it simple to use.
I think it's easy to compare.
Very true. Though the [lack of] success and interest in the Canon Cat, which was much closer to Raskin's vision than the shipping Macintosh ended up being, seems to belie this.
Everyone who uses a personal computer, smartphone, or tablet of any description, or has watched a 3D computer-animated film, has been affected, for the better, by his life's work. So have the millions around the world who make a living, directly or indirectly, from the businesses he built.
Also, those engineers and designers came from other fields because there wasn't a real PC industry until Steve and Bill came along. Even those engineers that worked with him commended him for being able to see the bigger picture.
On the other hand, I can't help but notice how much press/literature there has been on his genius and I think it's starting to be excessive. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not a fan of literature that praises success and goes in-depth into the lives/processes of talented people(that's why I'm not a fan of Gladwell's Outliers book). Where can you draw the line between admiring someone's achievements and idolising their every trait?