Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

What everyone forgets when they're trying to talk about how to be as effective as Jobs is that yes, he was a tryant ruling with an iron fist, he was a crazy asshole, etc, but he was also right, almost all the time. He knew what he wanted and he knew what would work and he knew what what in his power to create, and he made sure it got created. People try to replicate his management style without having that last quality.

If you're a madman tyrant asshole and your product is OnLive[1], you're just a madman tyrant asshole with a failed product because you didn't realize that your company's problems are far outside your scope of control.

If you're a madman tyrant asshole and your product instantly destroys two of the only three major smartphone OSes on the market at the time, you're Steve Jobs.

[1](I'm just picking on them as a failed startup, I have no idea what their CEO's management style was.)

View on HN

> etc, but he was also right, almost all the time.

And he would sometimes defer to people he trusted even if they diametrically disagreed with him. He _really_ didn't want to do an App Store and wasn't ever convinced it was a good idea until it was launched, but he saw that Forstall wasn't going to give up on the idea so he relented.

Yup... on top of that, this is the same person that he fired for disagreeing with him on the design aspects of these apps. Forstall was convinced that people weren't going to embrace apps unless they had an analog parallel that people could see as a bridge between what the technology could do and what already existed in real life. Jobs (Edit: maybe not, but a higher-up at Apple), on the other hand, wanted people to figure out on their own what the technology was capable of and skip all the cartoonish skeumorphism. I think you can objectively say, in hindsight, that Jobs was right even there.

PS. Yes, I know that Forstall left Apple after Jobs' death but Jobs and Ive pretty much saw eye to eye on the design of Apple products. (Edit: Removed "Steve famously hated skeumorphism.")

This is completely incorrect. I was at Apple working on iOS during this time period and helped implement and optimize many of those skeuomorphic UIs. Steve was a huge proponent of skeuomorphism.

One example is the iPad Contacts app. Originally it was a simple list of contacts like you'd find in Outlook. This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.

If that's the case, then I'm mistakenly attributing that decision to Steve but it was definitely a major part of the reason that Forstall was removed from Apple. I worked at Apple too when Steve was still there and I remember there being a shift right around the time of the iPad release to move away from skeumorphism as "people don't need to be convinced" to use tools by making them feel like real life. There were still layovers like the contacts app but new apps that were being created were all ditching the real-life look.

We're all just trading second-hand gossip here, I suspect, but according the official account [1] Forstall was laid off because he didn't play well with the top management. He was maneuvering politically within the hierarchy in a way that Cook did not condone, and he could no longer be protected by Jobs. The Apple Maps fiasco probably had a lot to do with it, too.

(Unfortunately, I think they fired the guy who, among all of them, was the most like Jobs, and I think Apple has suffered as a result.)

To say that he was fired for skeumorphism is insane. Jobs was responsible for that stuff.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott-fo...

Amen... It must have been Jony that hated the skeumorphism. I just remember a very heated debate and, frankly, my memory tends to conflate different events together when they're similar. Steve sided with Jony in a lot of design arguments so when then big change away from skeumorphism came, I seemed to remember Steve agreeing that, while it was great for initial adoption of the platform, computers were mainstream enough to not need that analog appeal. I'm probably wrong, but seeing the rapid shift away from it at Apple makes me feel like it wasn't an isolated incident/debate.

> This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.

Apparently the iCal stitching was copied from leather seats on Jobs' private jet! You couldn't make this stuff up[1].

1. http://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respon...

> Mark Bramhill: It meant nothing. Chrysler even admitted that the majority of it came from just outside Newark, New Jersey — not Corinth. The term was a marketing lie, meant to evoke feelings of old. Somehow, this seems fitting for Find My Friends. The leather made something so conceptually futuristic a little more familiar, even if it was nonsensical. It was a reassuring callback to an old aesthetic. And of course, where would the CEO of Apple find a reassuring, comforting texture?

Dave Wiskus: According to legend, it was the exact leather and stitching on his private jet.

http://www.macintosh.fm/transcript/1

Otherwise known as survivorship bias. Jobs was an asshole etc who happened to turn out ti be right. It's virtually impossible to know in advance which asshole will be proven right and which won't.

More specifically, he wasn't right because he was an asshole or tyrant. I've run in to folks who worshipped at the Jobs alter, and adopted his personality, in the thought that this leads to success (one person basically said it in so many words - 'it if worked for him...').

Jobs' legacy on the behaviour of so many future companies will be an interesting one, because some people only looked at that one side, and ran with it.

As somebody who used to be like that: startups/businesses are hard enough without burning employees out and people hating you. Your job is to remove negative factors, not create them.

This happened within Microsoft too, a lot of engineers who aspired to be Dave Cutler thought that they should start by acting like him.

He was an asshole that happened to be right several times in his career. First with Apple, then with Pixar, then again with Next and Apple. Your are being disingenuous by trying to paint it like he was just lucky.

I'm not saying he got lucky, I'm saying it's obvious he was right in hindsight and impossible to tell in foresight.

Being correct thrice is not proof that he was not lucky, after all, there's a man who was struck by lightning 7 times through no effort or genius on his part.

I'm not saying Jobs was not smart - but chance and luck was a huge factor in his successes. He wouldn't have had his come-back had Apple bought BeOS rather than Next.

"Being right" doesn't absolve acting like an asshole. I think people stayed because they found their jobs satisfying, engaging and meaningful. If you only have an occasional withering interaction with the wizard of Oz, that's probably OK, if everything else is good.

I agree - this is important, and seems to get missed often. Another important difference between Jobs and every other would-be tyrant CEO is that Apple was creating truly new, innovative, and important products, and doing so with the highest quality and taste. When the CEO of Consolidated Megacorp tries the same behavior, but does so in the context of their typically rotten products and/or services, they get the derision from their employees and from society at large that they deserve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com