Steve Jobs at MIT Sloan School of Management (1992) [video]
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Such assessment is a good proxy for a certain kind of intelligence only, because intelligence itself exists on a fairly wide spectrum, it is not a binary trait.
'proper' Engineering (MECH/AERO/CIVIL/EEE) is full of memes about this mindset.
CS is just as bad.
Most decent engineers loose this mindset after freshman year but many go on to see them selves as the MVP department of whatever business.
In some ways I think Startup culture fights against this because it's really obvious at small team scale how different skill sets are needed.
Sales is an outlier because compensation for the best can be really good. So, it's got a large group of very talented people and many far less so.
A normal consumer with a normal job is only really going to encounter the lower end of the field.
Smart and terrible person don't exclude each other.
It’s like the drill sergeant phenomenon— harsh leadership can have a place when attempting to forge ahead in a difficult mission as it often motivates the team to accomplish more than would normally be considered comfortable (or even healthy.)
An asshole boss on a mission is far preferable (to me,) than a “nice” boss driven by nothing other than maintaining the status quo.
Asshole bosses maintaining the status quo — now that genuinely sucks.
I don't think the meanness helped in creating the vision. They're two entirely separate things
>An asshole boss on a mission is far preferable (to me,) than a “nice” boss driven by nothing other than maintaining the status quo.
I'll agree on that, but still my experience has been that the bosses that extracted the most work from their employees were the ones that could give praise where it was due. I think Apple made it in spite of Steve Jobs character flaws, not because of them.
Whooaa, that's quite a stretch.
'Modern Computing' was happening with or without Steve Jobs. He certainly was an exemplar visionary that put the right parts together at the right time.
But, he did not create or define. Technological progress has it's own immutable momentum.
He did introduce a class of devices/products but Apple and Computational machines are not two concepts I associate.
The Windows OS has done more. My point being... yes he's a genius but in terms of Marketing, Business and seeing where the hockey puck is going.
He excelled at selling to desires, but look at the 'real computers' Apple has produced in recent years.
put another way, a lot of the _reason_ that companies like facebook and google are doing any computation in the first place is because of the level of data and interaction that people are doing on devices made by apple. You are welcome to make a distinction between a Cray and a MacBook pro, bu it is kind of pedantic.
If being able to create the 'end use software' on these devices, then again you're right.
If these devices are little more than portable web browsers, computing ?
Spend hours and hours going through the unedited version of history and judge for yourself. You can see the birth of many industries(Youtube-Mac Streaming, Google Search - Sherlock) in those keynotes and its refreshing to see it done so well. I'm not saying Jobs succeeded at all these things, but he definitely saw these things way way before anyone.
It’s an interpretation, on what all but the extremes on either side can agree is a subjective inquiry in the first place. Also, a bit of a futile and misguided one if used to minimize other’s contributions in the field.
But for the same reason, it’s folly to discount Jobs as not a, if not the, closest thing to a creator. This is true despite engineers’ immutable/incorrect belief that actually creating product value + building working software = changing the world is inevitable, this video proves otherwise (back room computing vs actually empowering operations using computing) and reminds us that real artists ship.
Had Steve not, who knows what computing would look like 2008-2018, but it’s certainly not a stretch to posit that it’d look a whole lot different, which is what it seems gg99 was saying.
Windows has done far far more in terms of being a platform for computational work.
Incorrect. Perhaps this was just your attempt at humor, but it couldn't possibly be further from the truth.
> The thought that he was just a snake oil huckster is lunacy.
That someone is intelligent does not prevent them from also being a snake oil huckster. As a matter of fact, intelligence will make you the best snake oil huckster.
"You can say there's five stages-- one, two, three, four, five. They have all these things. And stage one is companies that view manufacturing as a necessary evil. They wish they didn't have to do it, but damn it, they do. And all the way up through stage five, which is companies that view manufacturing as a competitive opportunity for competitive advantage. We can get better time to market, and get new products out faster. We get lower costs. We get higher quality.
"And in general, you know, you can put the American flag here [puts it under 1], and put the Japanese flag here [puts it under 5] [Laughter] [Applause]. And that's changing, however.
"By the way, just going back to software for a minute, I often apply this scale to computer companies, and how they look at software. See, I think most computer companies are stage one. They wish software had never been invented. I put Compaq in that category. And IBM is maybe stage two, and things like that. And I think there's only three companies in here [pointing at 5] and that's us, Apple and Microsoft, in stage five. We start everything with the software and work back."
Wow. I think this is a great way to look at how companies look at ML/AI: You have Facebook, Google, MS, Amazon trying to use it as a competitive advantage, whereas I'm sure there are some companies (medical?) that wish these systems were never invented.
This also shows why you would want to be at companies that look at software as a competitive advantage: as an engineer you are the profit centre and not the cost centre.
Using same analogy - When you look at Toyota, what does the first thing come to your mind? I hope Cars. So, computer engineering is going to be a secondary endeavor there.
Internally, MS and Apple have a lot of units\departments, which have many computer engineers, which they treat them as cost centres
I think they're both important. It's also interestng to note in this video he says that hardware has no competitive edge. But that was 1992. Now it has flipped, software has less competitive edge than hardware.
Jobs was repeatedly referring to system software in this talk, a category distinct from application software.
System software + own hardware = competitive advantage
Application software + own hardware = ?*
*Most likely a world of pain and heavy losses.
> “You never get three-dimensional,” he said. “You might have a lot of pictures on your wall, you can say ‘Look, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes.’ But you never really taste it.”
His view on Consulting is pretty interesting. Any consultants here who'd like to give the other perspective?
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/steve-jobs-talks-c...
The nature of consulting in my experience is such that a consultant will generally not have enough skin in the game, to use NNT's well-known phrase, to be able to deliver an out-sized outcome for the client, or to deliver an expensive but important life lesson for the consultant, if things go south.
Steve branded us as 'WebObjects Experts'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJX476dDFVc
The Lisa was too early. So was the Newton. So was the Next Cube and NeXTStep... (which of course now is iOS)
The Mac itself was too early for wide adoption. The first Mac had a tiny memory footprint and no hard drive. CPU and GPU technology needed time to speed up and shrink in size and cost. Apple survived on Apple II sales for years after the Mac was introduced and iterated, and nearly suffocated from mismanagement until Jobs returned and the iMac launched — Windows 95 was right on time.
Here's an Apple video about conversational voice-based digital assistants... from 1987 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0
The Valley is littered with husks of companies that had the right vision before the technology was ready (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). NeXT was almost one of them.
The popular narrative that Apple struggled from 1984 until 1997 isn't true. Apple was doing fine between around 1987-1994. It was vying for the #1 computer seller in the early 90s with HP.
Two things happen in 1995. Apple made a lot of low end computers and not enough high end computers and Windows 95 was good enough.
In 1995, the entire product line was confused, and the then-CEO had opened up the platform to commodity cloners, robbing Apple of its vertical market and hardware margin.
Jean Louis Gassée (founder of Be) was the main executive of Apple who went for short term margins instead of going for market share.
I got my first Mac in 1992 after owning an Apple //e for years. For the price of my Mac LCII - 68030-16Mhz with slow built in graphics, and a 512x384 12" monitor that wasn't compatible with most Mac games, I could have gotten a much faster 386, a sound card, and better graphics, much cheaper. Then Apple even cheap out more and had a 16 bit bus instead of the 32 bit bus. The Mac used 68030 processors that were used by other workstations, SCSI chips that were widely available, etc.
There are very few tech companies that successfully pivot into new areas and can transistion when technology changes that are not led by their founders. Just like "only Nixon could go to China", only Jobs could make the famous deal with Microsoft in 1997.
Not a time waste. Look at Elon. He spends a lot of his time in engaging at Twitter
The fallacy is thinking Elon uses Twitter like any other person uses Twitter. Sitting on his device, manually scrolling through it and replying sequentially. He's probably outsourced much of this to his media teams or other people he trusts to provide relevant material to engage with.
Nothing to do with how they conducted their lives.
That's basically the only reason I like to listen to the big VCs, because they're actually terribly open about their thoughts unlike virtually all CEOs. Because they also use their vision of the future as a marketing move. Someone mentioned Naval for example, that's no coincidence I think, angel/venture investors cluster quite high on my list of people talking openly about their perception of where things are going (regardless of whether it's a correct perception or not).
It's amazing how well this insight/prediction holds after 26 years, the only other comparable OS/OE today is linux, which didn't rely on the funding. Makes me think if/how another leap in computing software will happen.
If I had the money to bet, I'd be betting on AR as the next major paradigm, though. I think the idea of OS changes a lot when you get rid of the "slab of glass with a terminal" model. If computers are fundamentally ubiquitous, then what an OS does will need to be quite a bit different. I'm not sure it replaces a legacy computer, but I genuinely hope to have AR be a completely alternative option for most applications.
If I had to guess where the funding for that salesforce will come from, I'd guess: Softbank, and other mega-VC funds. if you do successfully create the next wave forward for computing, and you can provide the systems to enable it, the rewards are likely commensurate. I think this is why everyone is so interested in AR. Magic Leap is the darling, but Google, Apple, and Microsoft all agree that this is a critical turn, and are putting in the dollars to win.
iOS is NextStep, and Android is Linux, so in that way what Steve said holds true, given that Linux wasn't developed commercially.
This really rang true for me when I started developing with WebObjects (from Next). In the first week I was blown away how little code I had to write and how much was done for me. I knew the theory of a "Framework" and I think to this day many Libraries are called "Frameworks", but working with a real one is a game changer.
What's interesting, however, is that he does discuss this from several angles (my interpretation / memory below), namely that a) the hardware angle was a way to get people to use the software, b) a purely software venture couldn't sustain funding for the level of marketing required to break into the market, c) software seems to be moving slower than hardware (? - I guess that's the 80s / early 90s for you) and d) there's still a juicy hardware business that would be left off the table, if it were a software-only venture. So, it was a fairly well researched and opinionated bet, that just didn't pay off. I guess by tying the success of their software to their hardware, they ended up sealing its fate.