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Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

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Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#81

Post by eloisant »

JohnFen wrote: post #43
theaussiestew wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, we all tolerate things which are sheer crap, if viewed through a different set of lenses. For example, you probably tolerate many things that I personally would consider rubbish, and vice versa. You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all. 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 p…

> You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all. 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.

Going with the vision of one man, and the "style that he prefers" is often better than design by committee, or data-driven decisions that end up in the best case being a bland product that nobody hates, and in the worst case in a crappy product designed with the interest of the companies that produces it and its partners before the interests of the users/customers.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#82

Post by deanCommie »

naremu wrote: post #3

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. 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…

Watch (or listen to) some of the old Steve Jobs interviews at ALl Things Digital: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al...

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.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#83

Post by eloisant »

mbesto wrote: post #64
naremu wrote: post #3

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. 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…

> which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable. 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 comple…

One thing Apple was good at is not releasing a product until the technology to make it good exists.

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.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#84

Post by iamerroragent »

peteradio wrote: post #80
iamerroragent wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that appropriately analogous? Do you go to your doctor for advice about iPhones? Ironically I did learn how to get a dead engine to start via an Amish mechanic (he ran a business repairing generators for his community)

You've established a general reason to mistrust a person but then bring up the Amish for no apparent reason. What do the Amish have to do with this thread besides that they apparently always trust doctors (which I doubt is generally true)?

Point is that even groups we often associate with backwards thinking still will do the reasonable thing like caring about their health and listening to medical professionals.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#85

Post by eloisant »

anthk wrote: post #44
mturmon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, NeXTSTEP was purchased by Apple, as a part of NeXT Inc. NeXT Inc., in turn, was originally founded by some guy named Steve. So yeah, not exactly stolen.

Not "stolen" in a derogative way, but OFC I knew NeXT it's from Steve. But Apple without NeXT and BSD core it would die in 2001 against XP in the desktops. 2000 already was lights ahead Mac OS 9. In scientific Unix usage, GNU/Linux already won.

Apple needed a new OS, for sure, just like Microsoft needed a new OS after their DOS-based Windows 9x branch.

But there were other options than NeXT. They nearly bought Be (and BeOS) instead of NeXT and that might have worked. Also they could have built a new OS on top of BSD without NeXT, that might have worked as well.

Of course by buying NeXT they also got Steve Jobs back and that's a big part of what made them successful in the 2000's.

And by the way, Apple's rebirth in the 2000's was largely due to the iPod and iTunes more than MacOSX. It didn't really made a dent into XP's market share.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#86

Post by camjw »

iamerroragent wrote: post #78
filoleg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it doesn't mean that because Steve was foolish when it came to taking care of his health, all the other things he wasn't foolish about are suddenly worthless of being listened to. And it isn't like he was publicly promoting his healthcare advice in any way either.

Well suit yourself but for me personally it makes me really question the persons ability to reason in all other aspects of life as well. I think it's dangerous to ascribe talent and expertise to someone just because they made a shit ton of money.

I don't think anyone ascribes talent and expertise in building products to Steve Jobs purely because he made a shit ton of money... its because he made really good products.

I wonder what random flaw we could pull out on you? Do you put sugar in your coffee?

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#87

Post by didgetmaster »

naremu wrote: post #3

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. 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…

It is surprising how hard it is to find co-founders with business experience who will actually be enthusiastic about the product they are supposed to promote.

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...

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#88

Post by layer8 »

rrgok wrote: post #58

This may feel a little depressing, but I would like to hear the HN community's thoughts on this. Every time I hear about making progress or creating something beautiful, the first thing that comes to mind is: for how long? As humans, do we think about how long we are going to chase the ever-moving goal post of progress? Do we have a ballpark idea of it? Or are we moving like a dog chasing its own tail, going in circl…

> for how long?

As long as you have an itch to scratch. Steve Jobs didn’t care about progress or about creating for its own sake. He had ideas about what he wanted to see existing in the world, and worked to make those ideas come true.

You mention implementing nice features. The right thing to do is to implement the features you want to use (and to validate their design by actually using them yourself). Even if no one else likes the features, you like them and thus will have some fulfillment by implementing them. Furthermore, if you find the features useful, there is a good chance that there will be other people like you that also find them useful. So usually that is a good strategy, provided that you are an actual, and sufficiently representative, user of the product.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#89

Post by adventured »

petilon wrote: post #77
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I can agree with this take. > 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…

> Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do 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, a…

It's one of the hardest things any leader will ever have to do. Jobs said as much repeatedly. Older Jobs lavished credit onto his teams because he knew very well how hard it is to put them together and keep them together. And if you can manage to acquire them, and if you can manage to retain them, you have to then manage them as an individual and in function with a lot of other people that will inevitably clash at times (egos, conflicting ideas/visions/paths, whatever it may be).

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.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#90

Post by scj »

naremu wrote: post #3

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. 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…

Steve Jobs made products for himself. He just subsidized costs by selling to the rest of us.
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