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Steve Jobs's Real Genius

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Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#71

Post by bluekeybox »

makthrow wrote: post #63
bluekeybox wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yeah, sure... Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people. Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theorie…

Can you expand on this creative process? Interested in learning more.

It's an iterative process of tweaking, then stepping back to take a wider view, then tweaking some more, then stepping back again to evaluate, etc... until either (1) you're intuitively happy with the result or (2) your result conforms to some objective standard, or (3) both. It requires introspection and knowing how to "hack" your intuition. Different people hack their intuition in different ways, here is one way to do it, one that doesn't require drugs and going on a trip to India to meet holy men: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175272

Some people have this naive romantic notion that you basically go through some period of "suffering" as an artist and then suddenly you have some "grand vision" unfolding in front of you that's hidden to everybody else. What they miss is all the boring, often tweaking-like work that you have to perform before you are faced with that vision. Suffering without doing work doesn't lead to anything.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#72

Post by jroseattle »

I'm ready for the Jobs dissertations to be finished. I've made up my mind -- he was professionally successful but a personal failure.

It's my interpretation, so I'm not trying to change anyone else's opinion. But to me, if you have to scream at subordinates and mock colleagues and generally treat everyone else as inferior, you have failed -- in spite of one's accomplishments.

Some call that perfection or simply dealing with the attributes of genius. I call it a cop-out to let petulence and immaturity be an acceptable excuse for success.

An open request of all existing geniuses: try impressing us with accomplishments that don't require you to stomp on the dignity of others.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#73

Post by acqq »

mayanksinghal wrote: post #43
ghshephard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chapter 10 of Issacson's book spends quite a bit of time talking about Raskin vs Jobs on the Macintosh. Raskin is sourced several times for that chapter. The Macintosh would have been a very, very different product if Jobs had not taken over, and demanded a very different system than the one Raskin had envisioned. The Issacson Analysis (backed up by Atkinson) was that Raskin had envisioned an underpowered, less expen…

>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." 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#74

Post by gnaritas »

Hari_Seldon wrote: post #57
matwood wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether they (MS/Apple) paid for the idea is irrelevant when one is bashing the other for no imagination. In the Xerox scenario they both took what they saw from someone else and built on it. In that context Gates is right.

"In that context Gates is right" I disagree because Jobs/Apple looked at the xerox stuff and improved on it, drop down menus, overlapping windows etc. Whereas Microsoft just copied what Apple had done, bringing no new ideas to the table.

How did they improve on it, those first Mac didn't have everything those Smalltalk 80 images had, and Smalltalk already had overlapping windows and drop down menus. If anything, those first macs were a poor copy, not a better one.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#75

Post by MortenK »

bluekeybox wrote: post #46
Avshalom wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Really? Gladwell is kinda famous, written a couple of best sellers and stuff. That said opinions on him vary, his primary MO is to tell the audience something that contradicts common knowledge and provide enough facts to back it up, thereby making his audience feel smarter, which people love. On the other hand it's often just enough facts, and it's often technically true but a very shallow truth.

Yeah, yeah, sure... Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people. Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theorie…

You should read a bit more of Gladwell's works as well as his background before labeling him as a "relatively dumb medium".

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#76

Post by glhaynes »

gnaritas wrote: post #74
Hari_Seldon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In that context Gates is right" I disagree because Jobs/Apple looked at the xerox stuff and improved on it, drop down menus, overlapping windows etc. Whereas Microsoft just copied what Apple had done, bringing no new ideas to the table.

How did they improve on it, those first Mac didn't have everything those Smalltalk 80 images had, and Smalltalk already had overlapping windows and drop down menus. If anything, those first macs were a poor copy, not a better one.

In some ways that's true, but the original Mac was far more user-friendly and, importantly, hugely cheaper in a way that seems very unlikely to have been doable with Smalltalk in the first half of the 1980s.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#77

Post by irrationalfab »

rahoulb wrote: post #55
irrationalfab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was holistic thinking. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products." I still have no clue about how he managed to do it. For examp…

I'm sure part of it is that Steve Jobs actually understood programming (even if he wasn't a programmer himself) - coupled with his desire that things should be beautiful. He said that it was a mistake only taking the GUI to Apple, and he should have taken the whole Smalltalk environment. This in turn lead directly to why Next (and hence Cocoa) uses Objective-C. The fact that he would argue with Eric Schmidt in a car…

I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#78

Post by glhaynes »

mayanksinghal wrote: post #43
ghshephard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chapter 10 of Issacson's book spends quite a bit of time talking about Raskin vs Jobs on the Macintosh. Raskin is sourced several times for that chapter. The Macintosh would have been a very, very different product if Jobs had not taken over, and demanded a very different system than the one Raskin had envisioned. The Issacson Analysis (backed up by Atkinson) was that Raskin had envisioned an underpowered, less expen…

>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." 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…

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.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

Re: Steve Jobs's Real Genius

#80

Post by saturdaysaint »

The more I read, the more I think that any attempt to seperate Jobs' "shortcomings" from his "genius" are wrong from the start. I look at Gladwell's anecdotes and I see that Jobs' greatest talent was making relatively modest (often borrowed) visions into well-executed reality via his unique combination of aesthetic sensitivity and barely controlled personality power (which, as Isaacson gets at, also seems a function of his deep sensitivity).

Gladwell's theory falls apart if you really consider the competitors. If you look at the history of Microsoft's tablets and the Xerox Star, their biggest barrier wasn't a lack of "tweaking", it was the ability to get the products out of labs without getting killed or tweaked into mediocrity by a hundred conniving VPs.

Here I think we need to acknowledge that Jobs' personality was part of his genius. Perhaps typical 20th century corporate culture/governance has been so inherently larded with politics, so easily driven into misaligned incentives, that it's been almost inimical to creating excellent products of high technical sophistication (especially involving both hardware and software). Perhaps recognizing and rapidly correcting these inherent sicknesses (from removing "B players" to forcing dramatic but necessary strategy shifts)and actually shipping great products requires a certain craziness, a rudeness.

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