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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

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Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#51

Post by pwthornton »

cogman10 wrote: post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS.

Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#52

Post by JKCalhoun »

mannyv wrote: post #30
JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

I like this story about Jobs because it also points out what a bullshitter he appears to have been. These engineers aren't ignorant—I'm sure they saw the disconnect between the number of accumulated seconds saved and actual human lives somehow being saved. Somehow Jobs thought he could pull one over on them though with this "logic", ha ha.

It's actually not bullshit. Saving time is worth it. People use that metric when sitting in traffic...why not use it for computer response time? How many decades have been wasted in Windows waiting for updates?

Saving time is not bullshit, equating it to "saving lives" is.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#54

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cogman10 wrote: post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win.

Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)

How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.

In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#55

Post by Esophagus4 »

fennecbutt wrote: post #8
iSnow wrote: post #4

I am not sure Jobs was always a great boss, but if that conversation is somewhat true, it would have completely worked for me: - Big boss doesn't just yell at the product manager who then yells at the team leads who then calls "all hands" and unloads her stress on the team - Instead big boss explains his line of thinking and adding some nape of the napkin projections why this improvement actually matters. You might g…

Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums. Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wa…

I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for.

But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women.

I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best.

Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their life makes them impossible pricks in others.

Extreme excellence in one facet of life is what I admire people like that for.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#56

Post by SoftTalker »

malux85 wrote: post #43
SoftTalker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.NET has viable competitors. Windows, due to its monopoly, dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.

Because of legacy and momentum, not merit.

Yes, due to its monopoly. Edited my comment.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#57

Post by skeeter2020 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #48
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was like that not just for performance, but user experience across the board. “Good enough”, aka mediocrity, didn’t cut it and he didn’t care if he had to spend extra resources or even burn bridges to raise the bar to where he thought it needed to be. It’s a stark contrast to current industry norms, where anything that won’t keep the engagement and MRR bar charts on a steep incline gets vetoed. It’s more likely th…

Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering. Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions. He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

>> He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical…

What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines. 2. I agree - though he made as many bad big bets as good ones: no expandability of the original Mac, the iMac, PowerPC, are a few examples 3. was deeply technical? compared to his peer tech leaders this was just not true. He was a great product manager, but not particularly technical. I'd suggest you look at his entire corpus before you lionize a spectacular PM & designer, and incredibly flawed human being.

>> I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#58

Post by skeeter2020 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #22
cogman10 wrote: post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

I think .NET is one of the few projects Microsoft maintains that I admire that feel like they care a lot about quality, you can tell the people working on it are focused on performance and making sure its really well rounded. I would argue that .NET is Microsoft's greatest achievement / work of all time.

MS has had very little to do with the execution, but it has their logo on it, so I think you can count most Microsoft hardware (pre-Copilot button) as quality.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#59

Post by Esophagus4 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #57
Esophagus4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering. Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions. He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

>> He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines.…

[flagged]

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#60

Post by skeeter2020 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #55
fennecbutt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums. Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wa…

I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for. But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women. I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best. Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their li…

I think you're setting up a false choice, but maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree then, because I absolutely, 100% will not be nor work with assholes to accomplish something. The tech world is FULL of genuine nice people who has acomplished remarkable things, and while I do respect people like jobs for what he accomplished, I do not let them skate for the mean or hurtful things they have done.
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