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In Praise of Bad Steve

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Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#21

Post by mikeash »

sampsonjs wrote: post #14
nknight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point by a couple light years. Air escaping means there's room in the case for air to be in the first place. Air molecules aren't magic, and can't occupy the same space as other objects.

So what would happen if I dropped an Iphone 5 in water?

The point is not that you must create a product which contains no air. The point is that, as long as it does contain air, it can be made smaller. It may be difficult, it may be impractical, but it can be done.

Talking about how there's always going to be some air is completely missing the point. The point is that you can always push things a little further.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#22

Post by mikeash »

the_grind wrote: post #11

There is no doubt he left his mark on the world. However, I'd bet that > 90% of people who are praising him now would never have enjoyed working for him in any capacity.

I imagine you're right, but so what? A lot of excellent people are unpleasant in person in some circumstances. There's a lot more to being praiseworthy than simply being a nice person.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#23

Post by msbarnett »

ajross wrote: post #16
danso wrote: post #2

The talk about "Bad Steve" reminds me about Gundotra telling the "Icon Ambulance" story the day that Steve stepped down, in which Steve calls him up on a Sunday because "we have an urgent issue" involving the color gradient on the Google iphone icon. https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKx... For many people, that kind of anal attention to detail (and describing it as an "urgent" matter) would be…

I don't think that's really justified. Jobs had a long career, and only two real industry-dominating hits: the Apple II (most of which was Woz's work) and the iPhone. A lot of the hyperbole we're seeing right now is because Jobs had the mis/fortune to die at the very peak of his hit. Had we all been doing the same analysis in the mid-90's when NeXT was failing and Pixar a mostly academic curiosity, I doubt anyone wou…

We could argue about the domination of the Mac or the impact and legacy of NeXT and Pixar, but...

You really don't think the iPod was an industry-dominating hit? They sold hundreds of millions of them, and no other company ever really came up with a successful answer to them. It was left to Apple itself to kill them with the iPhone.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#25

Post by wuster »

the_grind wrote: post #11

There is no doubt he left his mark on the world. However, I'd bet that > 90% of people who are praising him now would never have enjoyed working for him in any capacity.

I've wondered about this myself - while I admire his accomplishments greatly, the stories of the kind of fear and admiration of Steve as a boss makes me wonder if that type of personality would have jived well with my wanting constructive feedback and positive reinforcement. It appears that in his later years (2000s), he attributed credit to his team and thanked them for hard work whenever he introduced a major product.

Tangent: One person would have first hand knowledge of Steve's management style: Andy Hertzfeld of the original Macintosh team: https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#26

Post by MaysonL »

mikeash wrote: post #20
ajross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's really justified. Jobs had a long career, and only two real industry-dominating hits: the Apple II (most of which was Woz's work) and the iPhone. A lot of the hyperbole we're seeing right now is because Jobs had the mis/fortune to die at the very peak of his hit. Had we all been doing the same analysis in the mid-90's when NeXT was failing and Pixar a mostly academic curiosity, I doubt anyone wou…

I'd say at least five. The Macintosh was also an industry-dominating hit. While the Mac itself never dominated in terms of market share, it so dominated the market that almost all PCs shipped in the last 20 years are imitations of it. The iPod pretty much took over the portable music player market and remains the dominant player today. And finally the iPad pretty much created the tablet market and everybody else is s…

And then there were Pixar and Next.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#27

Post by Someone »

nikuda wrote: post #5
angelbob wrote: post #3

I find myself hoping the iPod/aquarium story is true.

It could be, but I've heard this same story told about a Sony exec. instead of Steve, and that was before iPod's time. It was a camera that he dropped into a body of water though. The rest is same.

Funny that both devices cannot really be made without air in them.

That first iPod had a hard disk. Hard disks have disk heads that float on air.

Typical lenses aren't flat at the back; CCDs or films are. You could fill that void with glass with a different index of refraction, but that would only make the thing heavier, not smaller.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#28

Post by biot »

the_grind wrote: post #11

There is no doubt he left his mark on the world. However, I'd bet that > 90% of people who are praising him now would never have enjoyed working for him in any capacity.

I worked for an overly demanding boss and would not want to repeat that experience. He was demanding in a petty way about things that didn't matter such as turning up the temperature of the thermostat in Winter when it got too cold. It was due to insecurity and ego that this boss went on his power trips.

I would have loved to work for Steve Jobs as he's passionate and demanding about things that do matter. The perfection makes a difference in the product rather than making a difference in his ego.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#29

Post by martey »

nikuda wrote: post #5
angelbob wrote: post #3

I find myself hoping the iPod/aquarium story is true.

It could be, but I've heard this same story told about a Sony exec. instead of Steve, and that was before iPod's time. It was a camera that he dropped into a body of water though. The rest is same.

Doing as exhaustive of a search as I could, I found a couple of interesting things. The Sony version of the parable seems to center on the Walkman (as opposed to a camera), which was built in the late 1970s, and either Akio Morita or Masaru Ibuka (co-founders of Sony). However, the earliest reference on the Internet to it I can find is from September 2002 [^1], about a year after the iPod was released, making its origins inconclusive. The fact that it is linked to multiple founders of powerful technology companies suggests to me that it is apocryphal.

[^1]: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1000&me...

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#30

Post by melling »

melling wrote: post #19
sampsonjs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would happen if I dropped an Iphone 5 in water?

Air bubbles would escape and you would have to make it smaller. That was a really stupid question. Yes, sometimes I wish I could be Steve and herd the Geek community. I could make a shippable Linux that consumers would pay for. Gnome, KDE, Unity... Hey, let's call it LibreOffice... get it? Geeks should try to think like normal humans... All that effort could actually change the world.

The point was that Steve wanted it smaller so he made a dramatic gesture to demonstrate to the engineers that he would not accept no for an answer.

Steve understood what is important in a product, and more importantly, what is not. The Linux community, for example, has spent many years divided, building several window managers and hundreds of distros, never focusing on what is really important to consumers, in general. The iPad already has more Internet market share than desktop Linux in a very short period of time.

Was that better guys? Personally I like my first response better. Definitely had more flavor, but hey, this is HN and one needs to tread lightly.

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