“Those people deserve respect and recognition too.”
ORLY? Name them.
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Not “great man”. Great vision.
Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not.
Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround himself with high-quality technical people and communicate effectively with them, but make no mistake: they were there to deliver his vision, not their own.
Tech-exclusive geeks a useful resource, but they have to be kept on a zero-length leash lest they start thinking that they should be the ones in charge since they know more about tech than anyone else. And the moment they’re allowed to get away with it, and you end up with the tails-wagging-the-dog internecine malfunction that plagued Sculley’s Apple in the 90s and has to some extent resurfaced under Cook.
Lots of things happened under Jobs 2.0. That was NEVER one of them.
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Case in point: Just take the endless gushing geek love for Cook-Apple’s Swift language. And then look at how little the iOS platform itself has moved forward over the 10 years, it’s taken to [partly] replace ObjC with the only incrementally improved Swift. When NeXT created what is now AppKit, it was 20 years ahead of its time. Now it’s a good ten behind, and massively devalued to boot by the rotten impedance-mismatch between ObjC/Cococa’s Smalltalk-inspired model and Swift’s C++-like semantics.
Had Jobs not passed, I seriously doubt Lattner’s pet project would ever have advanced to the point of daylight. Steve would’ve looked at it and asked: How can it add to Apple’s existing investments? And then told Lattner to chuck it, and create an “Objective-C 3.0”; that is, the smallest delta between what they already had (ObjC 2.0) and the modern, safe, easy-to-use (type-inferred, no-nonsense) language they so pressingly needed.
..
Look, I don’t doubt eventually Apple will migrate all but the large legacy productivity apps like Office and CC away from AppKit and ObjC and onto Swift and SwiftUI. But whose interest does that really serve? The ten million geeks who get paid for writing and rewriting all that code, and have huge fun squandering millions of development-hours doing so? Or the billion users, who for years see minimal progress or improvement in their iOS app experience?
Not to put too a fine a point on it: if Google Android is failing to capitalize on iPhone’s Swift-induced stall-out by charging ahead in that time, it’s only because it has the same geek-serving internal dysfunction undermining its own ability to innovate and advance the USER product experience.
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TL;DR: I’ve launched a tech startup, [mis]run it, and cratered it. And that was with with a genuinely unique, groundbreaking, and already working tech with the product potential to revolutionize a major chunk of trillion-dollar global industry, saving and generating customers billions of dollars a year.
It’s an experience that has given me a whole new appreciation for what another nobody person starting out of his garage, and with his own false starts and failures, was ultimately able to build.
And I would trade 20 years of programming process for just one day of salesmanship from Steve Jobs’ left toe, and know I’d got the best deal by far. Like I say, this is not about a person. It is about having the larger vision and having the skills to deliver it.
Jobs was far more of a "tech guy" than either Sculley or Cook. He understood the technology very well, even if he wasn't writing code.
I would also say, Jobs had a far, far higher regard for technical talent than you do. He was absolutely obsessed with finding the absolute best engineering and technical people to work for him so he could deliver his vision. He recognized the value of Woz's talents more than Woz himself. He gathered the original Mac team. If he had, say, a random group of Microsoft or IBM developers, the Mac never would have happened. Same with Next, many of whom were still around to deliver iOS and the iPhone.
Your take is like a professional sports manager saying having good athletes isn't important, the quality of the manager's managing is the only thing that matters.
“Your take is like a professional sports manager saying having good athletes isn't important, the quality of the manager's managing is the only thing that matters.”
Postscript: You misread me. I understand where Jobs was coming from better than you think. But maybe I’m not explaining myself well.
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When my old man retired, he was executive manager for a national power company overseeing distribution network. Senior leadership. But he started out as a junior line engineer freshly qualified from EE school, and over the following three decades worked his way up from that.
(I still remember those early Christmas callouts: all the lights’d go out; and off into the night he would go, like Batman.:)
And as he later always said to engineers under him, his job was to know enough engineering to manage them effectively, and their job was to be the experts at all the details and to always keep him right. And his engineers loved him for it. Not least ’cos that was a job where mistakes don’t just upset business and shut down chunks of the country, they cause closed-coffin funerals and legal inquests too.
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i.e. My old man was a bloody great manager because he was a damn good engineer to begin with. And while he could’ve been a happy engineer doing happy engineering things all his life he was determined to be far more, and worked his arse off to achieve it too.
And that’s the kind of geek Steve Jobs was. Someone who could’ve easily lived within comfortable geeky limitations, but utterly refused to do so.
“Jobs was far more of a "tech guy" than either Sculley or Cook.”
Very true. “Renaissance Man” is a such cliche, but Steve Jobs really was. Having those tech skills and interests under his belt is what made him such a fabulous tech leader and tech salesman; and without that mix he’d have just been one more Swiss Tony bullshit artist in an ocean of the bums. (Like many here I’ve worked with that sort, and the old joke about the salesman, the developer, and the bear is frighteningly on the nose.)
But whereas someone like Woz loved and built tech for its own sake, and was perfectly happy doing that and nothing else all his life, Jobs always saw tech as just the means to his own ends: which wasn’t even inventing revolutionary new products so much as inventing revolutionary new markets to sell those products into. The idea that personal computers should be Consumer Devices that “Just Work”; that was absolutely Jobs.
And yeah, Job always used the very best tech talent he could find, because the man’s own standards started far above the level that most geeks declare “utterly impossible; can’t be done”, and he had ZERO tolerance for that. And of course, with the very best tools in hand, he wrangled that “impossible” right out of them; and the rest is history.
Woz made tech. Jobs made markets.
As for Sculley, he made a hash. And while Cook may be raking in cash right now, he’s really made a hash of it too: for he’s not made a single new new market† in a decade, while Apple’s rivals—Amazon and Google—are stealing the long-term lead that Jobs’s pre-Cook Apple had worked so hard to build up.
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(† And no, things like earpods and TV programming do no count, because they’re only addons, not standalone products, and so can only sell as well the iPhone sells. And the moment iPhone sales drop off a cliff, Cook’s whole undiversified house of cards collapses, and they might as well shut up shop and give the money back to the shareholders.)
I hear you, I do, but here's another perspective: Jobs without Wozniak wound up being California's third-best Mercedes salesman.
And neither of them would've mattered a jot if they were born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or if they were medieval peasants, or if Jobs hadn't been adopted, or or or ...
Luck is enormously influential. There thousands of Jobsalikes per Jobs. Necessity isn't sufficiency.
ORLY? Name them.
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Not “great man”. Great vision.
Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not.
Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround himself with high-quality technical people and communicate effectively with them, but make no mistake: they were there to deliver his vision, not their own.
Tech-exclusive geeks a useful resource, but they have to be kept on a zero-length leash lest they start thinking that they should be the ones in charge since they know more about tech than anyone else. And the moment they’re allowed to get away with it, and you end up with the tails-wagging-the-dog internecine malfunction that plagued Sculley’s Apple in the 90s and has to some extent resurfaced under Cook.
Lots of things happened under Jobs 2.0. That was NEVER one of them.
..
Case in point: Just take the endless gushing geek love for Cook-Apple’s Swift language. And then look at how little the iOS platform itself has moved forward over the 10 years, it’s taken to [partly] replace ObjC with the only incrementally improved Swift. When NeXT created what is now AppKit, it was 20 years ahead of its time. Now it’s a good ten behind, and massively devalued to boot by the rotten impedance-mismatch between ObjC/Cococa’s Smalltalk-inspired model and Swift’s C++-like semantics.
Had Jobs not passed, I seriously doubt Lattner’s pet project would ever have advanced to the point of daylight. Steve would’ve looked at it and asked: How can it add to Apple’s existing investments? And then told Lattner to chuck it, and create an “Objective-C 3.0”; that is, the smallest delta between what they already had (ObjC 2.0) and the modern, safe, easy-to-use (type-inferred, no-nonsense) language they so pressingly needed.
..
Look, I don’t doubt eventually Apple will migrate all but the large legacy productivity apps like Office and CC away from AppKit and ObjC and onto Swift and SwiftUI. But whose interest does that really serve? The ten million geeks who get paid for writing and rewriting all that code, and have huge fun squandering millions of development-hours doing so? Or the billion users, who for years see minimal progress or improvement in their iOS app experience?
Not to put too a fine a point on it: if Google Android is failing to capitalize on iPhone’s Swift-induced stall-out by charging ahead in that time, it’s only because it has the same geek-serving internal dysfunction undermining its own ability to innovate and advance the USER product experience.
--
TL;DR: I’ve launched a tech startup, [mis]run it, and cratered it. And that was with with a genuinely unique, groundbreaking, and already working tech with the product potential to revolutionize a major chunk of trillion-dollar global industry, saving and generating customers billions of dollars a year.
It’s an experience that has given me a whole new appreciation for what another nobody person starting out of his garage, and with his own false starts and failures, was ultimately able to build.
And I would trade 20 years of programming process for just one day of salesmanship from Steve Jobs’ left toe, and know I’d got the best deal by far. Like I say, this is not about a person. It is about having the larger vision and having the skills to deliver it.