Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions.
He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)
What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines. 2. I agree - though he made as many bad big bets as good ones: no expandability of the original Mac, the iMac, PowerPC, are a few examples 3. was deeply technical? compared to his peer tech leaders this was just not true. He was a great product manager, but not particularly technical. I'd suggest you look at his entire corpus before you lionize a spectacular PM & designer, and incredibly flawed human being.
>> I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)
So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?
Your comment lacks any content other than a shallow emotional reaction.
To add to the discussion, this anecdote ending says it all:
> I honestly liked and respected the guy; but it was agreed among us Apple engineers that having Steve Jobs know who you actually were was usually not a good thing. It meant your future with Apple was going to be shorter than you would probably like.
Isn't that what they get the big pay package for?
One of his biographers gave an example of how some cabinet makers only use good wood on the front and side, but Jobs would want good quality wood on the back as well.
It’s a stark contrast to current industry norms, where anything that won’t keep the engagement and MRR bar charts on a steep incline gets vetoed. It’s more likely that memory consumption will be tripled and UI will be modified to harass users into compliance with whatever hare-brained thing product managers are pushing than it is for the software to become more efficient, pleasant, and useful.