No one is going to care about your product more than you, so if you don't care.. then no one does. Jobs got that and lived by it.
It sounds trivial, but how many of the current FAANG founders/CEOs actually care about their product outside of Zuck? Musk maybe, not necessarily for good reason, and his attention is spread far too thin.
There's little modern analogy for the 80s-90s Jobs-Gates feud, and even Gates clearly didn't care as much given how early he exited and moved on with life.
A lot of modern tech is founded by guys who want to cash out and move onto their science projects/hobbies, and it shows.
I don't think Zuckerberg cares about his product, really. He cares about the income from his product. That's a different thing.
My point is, many of us would have thought the plastic screen was fine, and that wasn’t because we weren’t “enthusiastic” about our own products. The same goes for a whole range of tools that we use everyday. It’s likely that in several years time we’ll look back and think it was ridiculous we thought some of them were good or even acceptable.
Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish. This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. With that attitude in mind, it’s no wonder Apple became so successful, because they and Jobs actively embraced both.
There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc.
Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenant of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.
Nit / correction (for helpfulness not pedantry)
tenant: renter or occupant vs tenet: guiding principle
Jobs loved skeuomorpism, which isn't inherently bad, but having iOS UI elements reproduce the stitching from seats in his private jet skews close to "purely visual". Also, the (early) iOS date picker was unforgivable - I assume Jobs was aware of its existence & approved of its rubber-stamp-like, user-hostile skeuomorphic design
No. Hold up.
This interface has 1 obvious reason that I see that no fancy polished interface can ever come close to: loading speed.
More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.
I 100% agree. "Good taste" is just another phrase that means "style that I prefer". There is no such thing as an objective ideal of good taste. It's all about human preferences, and that gets very complicated very quickly.
Strongly disagreed overall. I agree that there are plenty of situations where it is indeed just a matter of preference and is very subjective. But it is disingenous to claim that there is never such a thing as an objectively better preference.
Literally the specific example we are talking about in this thread - plastic prototype iPhone screens and keys scratching them. Is it really not objectively better to have a screen made of materials that don't get scratched by keys in your pocket easily? I don't think it is subjective at all.
I don't think it's meant as a "filter", just built for its target audience of people with high enough standards to dislike blinking notification icons, cookie popups and website loading screens.
> with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.
I don't think I've ever witnessed someone expressing this opinion. It just seems to be a rarity that a budget covers both function and form. And if I have to choose then I prefer to not throw my PC out the window.
I certainly don't hold it up for any gatekeeping nonsense, and frankly I despise that anyone even uses the word "normies". What I like about this site's UI is that it places function over form and isn't built on a pile of trendy garbage and designed by people who never use it.
Survivorship bias. Jobs himself was almost Apple's undoing multiple times because he cared more about the product than profits.
Probably why we all use Amazon but none of us love doing so. If someone else figured out delivery & pricing (Walmart is trying with Jet), we'll all slowly defect. There's no lock in.
Kindle is an adequate product that has sporadic iterative improvements and occasional backslides. Hardware is finally fine after many years of not, software is less so.
Alexa is whatever.
AWS is a cash cow, but thats more of a B2B/Enterprise offering.
That is the product and it's clear Bezos & crew obsessed on getting commerce to be as frictionless as possible & earning customer loyalty. Dealing with Amazon as a customer is still 2x better than any other online retailer in my experience.
> He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward.
Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".
Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, and inspire them.
Assembling top talent is something very few can do. Assembling it and then keeping that talent together and getting it to work in some manner of harmony, almost nobody can do that, it's an extraordinarily rare skill.
He sure knew how to keep people together!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...
Yeah that's exactly why Jobs never did that. Nobody has to "recognize top talent" to assemble it.
He knew that talent likes a good challenge without being micromanaged. The talent becomes top talent when they overcome the challenges and accomplish something new and exciting. You retain them by maximizing their autonomy. That's all.
You need to have a vision that top talent believes in, in order to retain them.
You can either listen to what he's literally saying, or just be impressed by his rhetoric.
He says pretty bluntly they: "... were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where the technology was and what we could do with that technology"
So, basically find young people with tons of enthusiasm for their career, put them all together on a team, and let them sort themselves out. It's naturally much easier to find motivation than "top talent". There's nothing special about that strategy and he's not the first to think of it. Like he says, "the vision" is all the managing he does, but let's be honest there are plenty of great engineers who don't really have an opinion on their work beyond how free they are to do it and experiment. They don't have to give a rat's ass about what their boss wants to deliver it anyway.
Also: "Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so that people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision".
If you watch the rest of the video I linked it's pretty clear that Apple probably did hire and fire plenty of morons that the engineers would weed out (specifically mentioned is the Macintosh team).
The reason hiring is more difficult today vs then isn't because Steve Jobs was so great, but because the internet has brought upon the doorstep of every business a flood of highly motivated drones who don't know what they're doing and will only bother learning if they're getting paid to do it. The demise of entry level jobs and other cost cutting is partially to blame as well.
I guess the modern solution is contract-to-hire so there's some kind of buffer between the horde out there and the workplace you're cultivating.
All kinds of idiots have done that: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and even Donald J. Trump have all proven capable of not mucking up if they've got enough help.
When you strip away Jobs' great council of advisors, amazing industry connections and production value, you're left with a guy. Kinda like how without the marketing and software, an iPhone just becomes a computer again. It's a vulnerable fact to accept, but denying it doesn't make us closer to understanding how humans or iPhones work. The hunger for knowing what made Jobs special left us foolishly vulnerable to worshiping him. A man with a big company is still a man, and if that man is an asshole then we shouldn't preach the opposite to respect their vision. Same goes for Walt Disney or Elon Musk - a futurist can still be deeply wrong in their beliefs. Many are, which is why their ideas are so grand in the first place.
So, let's appreciate the good parts and use the bad as a cautionary tale. Both sides of his life give us plenty to teach from.
2. They have minimal people management experience, which means they never understood how hard it is to recruit top talent, retain them, all while molding them into something much better.
3. They also have zero sales experience and talent. As if trying to convince people to buy could be automated by their software ( Google ).
4. They have little understanding of Marketing. How to market their product to the outside world.
5. They have no understanding of how PR works.
6. They have little understanding of "real world". Zero interest rate, easy access of money, and bull market for the past 15 years meant most never been through a recession.
HN used to be full of entrepreneur, after all it is a forum for startup. And its pro-business stand is why on Wiki it is still listed as alt-right. And yet somehow all of that were gone.
Which required a technological innovation that may or may not existed at the time. This is like saying "autonomous cars can't ever hit a human being". Well, no shit, that would be great, but the technology isn't there yet.
It's well and good to romanticize Steve Jobs, but "assigning single factor causation to the output of complex adaptive system is a triumph of hope over experience"...his obsession with product design was certainly a factor, but it wasn't the ONLY factor.
There have been rumors of an iPhone way before release, even the name was obvious to everyone (after the iPod and the iMac), and Apple probably had a prototype with a stylus and a plastic screen. However they didn't release it until capacitive screen were ready for consumer electronics.
That's why Apple is often seen not as the company that makes a certain product category popular: because they wait until all the pieces are in places when other companies will release earlier with whatever tech is available at the time.
It is remarkable how prescient he is about the future that was a decade away. How revolutionary some of the things he demo'd were at the time that we now take absolutely for granted.
The man was mercurial and probably not fun to work for. And many a marriage or personal relationship was probably ruined by the intense Apple work environment at the time.
But he shaped (not built) a lot of our future. No one else at the time was as visionary.
And I say this as someone who endlessly criticized Apple at the time. I hated everything they were doing. I thought they were making toys for finger painters. I didn't see it.
https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139
It's 3m and to the point. Build products the customer wants instead of building and marketing your existing tech.
I am a technical founder who has tried (and failed) a few times to get a business partner on board to promote and sell the product. I had two guys join on with big talk about how they were perfect for turning it into a home-run project. Neither one lasted even a year. No matter how many demos I showed them and walked them through the product (software that does data management); I just couldn't get them to try it out on their own and be excited about the technology.
https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-job...
Did you ever discover any questions/filtering criteria for weeding out potential founders who lack the vision needed?
We probably would've gotten along just fine with scratched plastic screens after some use, but for someone at that level to put their foot down and not let it happen is so incredibly rare.
How many CEOs, product managers and the like have been caught promoting their own brand with a "tweeted from iPhone" tagline. Probably "efficient business people", but literally won't touch their own product while telling others to buy it.
In contrast, one of the stories that always sticks in my mind about Jobs is one of early iPhone production runs having plastic screens, which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable.
In a world where min-maxing cost to profit is all that matters, perpetual doubting of the efficacy of quality, all it took to cement Steve Jobs in the tech hall of history is some of the lowest hanging fruit left for him. Like hating crappy, easily scratched and degraded plastic screens.
For all his faults, in retrospect, it was kind of nice to see an enthusiastic founding member of a large company say "we can do better" and in many ways, succeed.