Change the title OR the text.
This was an interesting article about the cool things he did.
Steve Jobs was involved in this work but this is NOT what this article is about.
What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
101–110 of 138 posts
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#102One wonders at what Tim Cook regards his true purpose with the "magic wand of CEO"?
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading his biography by Walter Isaacson. I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs. At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made. After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him. Walter Isaacs…
Oh no no no! I thought the same about Jobs back in 1985 but everything that we've learned about him since points up how irreplaceable he was. Without Jobs, Wozniak would have been a brilliant, happy, but obscure engineer at HP, Ive talents would have been mostly wasted, and Jef Raskin would still have, maybe, gotten a shot to build the Swyft and the Archy which even in our universe are obscure. Without Jobs you would…
And that's more or less the thing.
Maybe iWoz is more sympathetic towards Jobs (even if it narrates a deception of Woz by Jobs)
Because it shows Jobs getting free chips for Woz, getting deals, etc, it shows a more 'powerless' side of Jobs.
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#104Two things that stood-out: >"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M" and >"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."
I found the second one strange since I'd also read this, with my empasis added:
"Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, __he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.__"
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
from: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Fi...
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is only ONE thing that a maps product absolutely has to get right, and that's the data. It's the core of the whole product. It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with th…
Yeah, well, maybe I'm the only one, but apple maps work fine for me. Massive improvement over the old maps experience. Google regularly got a ton of things wrong, even in urban areas like San Francisco, so I give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to minor mistakes. Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other…
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isaacson made several telling errors about Apple products, showing he didn't really know them--for example, he seems not to understand how NeXT technology is still the core of OS X and iOS. This is not a trivial detail, since if Jobs was all about products you're not going to understand his work if you don't understand the products. So, Isaacson fails as a book that will help you understand Job's work, or his managem…
You're spot on about Apple relying on NeXT technologies in OS X / iOS renaissance. I too was surprised this wasn't really mentioned in the book.
I wanted to buy the book hoping to read more about the transition from NeXT to OS X. Thanks for telling me I shouldn't buy the book!
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#107"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers." Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out…
I still remember the "writing to floppy" animation on the thing. It was a seriously cool bit of kit to use, chuck it in your bag with a box of floppies and you were good to go.
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading his biography by Walter Isaacson. I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs. At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made. After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him. Walter Isaacs…
This linked article is one of the first things that has made me think of Steve in a positive light. I'm generally fairly negative about him because 1. I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society ( producer products are the future), and I worry that if they e…
> #2 the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products (...) producer products are the future.
In one sense, Apple has encourage people to be producers by making it easier to produce financially-viable software. Are you comparing Apple's vision with Microsoft's, or do you have something else in mind?
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#109So what's it actually like working with Steve Jobs? Half joking aside, it would have been nice if the author would have spent more than 1/5th of the article actually talking about what he claimed he was going to give insight on. Instead the author spent most of the article tooting his own horn, which is fine, if that's what the title had indicated to expect.
Yes, I kept reading about the author's feats and glory thinking "well, great, but... let me check the title again". Apparently, a fair amount of ego rubs off on you when you work with Steve Jobs :)
Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
#110Not to sound harsh but reading that was a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to this: Q: What is it really like working with Steve Jobs? A: It wasn't magic, it was hard work, thoughtful design, and constant iteration. No way, really? Come on, I'm sure everyone on HN knows that this is true for any product.
Also - Am I the only one who thinks that Apple's products aren't really very good?