Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–287 of 287 posts

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#281

Post by kragen »

xp84 wrote: post #280
kragen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses)…

I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true: NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by…

it was successful at delivering apple back into the control of steve jobs; it wasn't successful for investors along the way who bought stock at a higher price than the 427 million dollars apple eventually paid, but we weren't talking about whether steve jobs's investors were successful, but about whether steve jobs was successful. investors like canon were his cannon fodder. even a good slice of the investors ended up getting rich, tho

it's hard to imagine what would have counted as a bigger success for steve jobs

rod canion redefined the entire computer business once: he made open platforms dominant for personal computers. steve jobs did it four times: in 01977 by converting personal computers from hobbyist machines to home appliances; in 01984 by making the wimp gui the dominant interaction paradigm; in 01998 by redefining personal computers from home appliances to fashion accessories; and in 02007 by replacing the open-platform wimp gui with non-end-user-programmable sealed prisons with multitouch and always-on mobile internet access

obviously none of these involved him inventing anything, and most of them are at best morally ambiguous, but certainly he set out to do each of those things and then successfully did them

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#282

Post by speeder »

pintxo wrote: post #245
speeder wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in Portugal. Here your real wages are tiny compared to the company expenses. To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer. So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending t…

So, Portugal is pretty much in my 1.2-1.3 range?

So a company to pay 500 euro in wages, spends 1000. Thus 1000/500 = 1.2 to 1.3. I don't get it.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#283

Post by pintxo »

speeder wrote: post #282
pintxo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, Portugal is pretty much in my 1.2-1.3 range?

So a company to pay 500 euro in wages, spends 1000. Thus 1000/500 = 1.2 to 1.3. I don't get it.

I am purely looking at gross salary. As that’s the only measure of interest for the company. How much of that you loose to the state, that’s your problem. /s

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#284

Post by HumblyTossed »

namdnay wrote: post #206
icelancer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc. Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what…

What I always say is that McDonalds have laminated recipes pinned to the wall. A Michelin starred restaurant doesn't. Both of these are good processes

Those restaurants have process. It's called prep or set up or mise en place or whatever. But there's process.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#285

Post by HumblyTossed »

kevmo314 wrote: post #177
starky wrote: post #44

I like the comparison of content over process. In my experience a small team full of highly skilled engineers that are motivated to get stuff done don't need much process because they will do the right thing. But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. Nothing drives me…

> But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else? I've seen quite a few teams kneecap them…

> But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that?

Because that team got stuck with all the work.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#286

Post by seec »

ksec wrote: post #240
NickC25 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. I have a feeling that's partially due to how much money a lot of those people (and Apple shareholders) have made under Cook's leadership. The growth has been nothing short of incredible. IIRC Apple shares have grown like 8x or 9x under him (when accounting for inflation). That said, Apple products no longer really have that magic tha…

Very well said. Tim Cook definitely lost the "Why". The "Why" in PR, ever since Kattie Cotton retired. The "Why" in marketing, how many agency did they try and now they are doing it in house. The "Why" in product range. The "Why" in Apple Store Retail. Or literally every single "Why" that Apple had but are lost as executive leaves. And you can tell even if you dont know much about supply chain. Their whole product ma…

Yeah, that's definitely the problem with Apple today. The products aren't bad at all but for the price asked they feel way too much like a better copy/version of whatever cheaper model exists in the same category. Sure, the fit and finish is extremely good but they now have competitors that do just as well (or so close that it doesn't matter) but at a much better price.

I think the only thing still worthwhile at Apple is macOS but they have been on a killing spree trying to completely annihilate everything that made it good in the first place. In some ways it's still somewhat nicer to use than Windows but it matters much less now that their hardware prices have skyrocketed and the lineup only makes sense in a profit maximization strategy.

Their desktops do not make sense at the price they are sold at: what I would consider a minimum viable (16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD) Mac Mini starts at 1200€ (but what you really want is the "Pro" 10 cores version at 1500€). The problem is that you can literally get a laptop that will perform similarly for the same price or even less money. You could say that the laptop has a bad screen (the one I checked had a recent OLED so that's doubtful) or won't last on battery or whatever but in comparison you basically get it for free.

Their laptop could be good but the design is not great and the pricing is just insane when you consider the market. The minimum viable pricing for a MacBook Air would be 1760€ and a MacBook Pro 2230€. At those prices you get very underwhelming CPU/GPU performance considering. For all the hype Apple Silicon gets, base versions of their chips are good for efficiency but when you consider overall performance it's not really a good deal. Again, what you really want is the "Pro" version, but it starts at 2.5K€ and at this point you realize that you could buy a more performant PC plus a decent laptop to carry around with about the same budget. Now macOS is nice, but at what price?

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#287

Post by tesdinger »

tlivolsi wrote: post #161
tesdinger wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Germany, we had a bad experience listening to our superstar Adolf and decided we should try democracy next time. Some parts of.the political party AFD is trying to change that, unsuccessfully, so far.

What the heck are you talking about?

Adolf Hitler
Post reply on HN