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Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

I think the most important thing that Jobs said in those interviews was his reason why he felt Google was like Microsoft: because they were engineering companies first-and-foremost that lacked the "artistic" element or the humanity-aspect that Apple focused on.

I think after I heard that, I finally "got" Steve Jobs and his philosophy. He was technical, but deeply philosophical and artistic, so much so that when he was in college he took a calligraphy course, which ended up being why we have true-type fonts. He was the one that merged technology with humanity... he didn't insist on using true-type fonts because it would add 10% to the bottom line, or because it solved a problem, he insisted on it because it was beautiful to look at. I think I finally get it now.

That's why he believed that Microsoft and Google's applications sucked... because they were technology-focused as opposed to focusing on improving lives, or inspiring people.

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I see, this must be why the iPod has improved people's lives so much whereas Google search and maps were merely about pointless technology.

Don't confuse my interpretations of what Jobs was saying with what I believe.

That being said, if I had to interpret what Jobs would say to your statement, I believe he would say that the iPod was inspiring, it transformed how people listened to music. And he would be right because iTunes became the largest seller of music, to the point that artists no longer sell CDs as much anymore, it's all piecemeal mp3s.

In terms of Google search and maps, I would also intepret Jobs saying that it has good functionality, but what made it great was tying it together with the iPhone. If you watch the famous 2007 interview with Jobs and Gates at the allthingsd conference, he mentions how they showed Google Maps to the Google engineers and they were blown away at how much more useful it was using the iPhone. The iPhone completely transformed the experience, and brought it to a new level, which is what he predicted the iPhone would do. And if you listen to what Marissa Mayer said earlier this year, 2011 was the year when more mobile users used Google Maps than desktop users. Google maps is a completely different experience with a smartphone, and it's those sort of transformational, humanity-targeted aspects that I believe Jobs was going for, not just engineering functionality.

I think that is missing the point here and confuses how the two companies work.

Google do have a vision which is to make everything indexable. They also have a business model which is use advertising to pay for it.

Google tries all sorts of things and see what sticks.

Apple doesn't work that way.

They create their products based on a a long term belief. They can tell you exactly why they do what they do and how it fits into their larger vision.

In my mind it means that one is taking an investors approach (google diversification strategy)

And the other is taking an artists approach (apples intuition)

They are both great companies but for very very different reasons.

Apple doesn't try all sorts of things and sees what sticks? Where is the long term belief in Ping? How is AppleTV working out?

Every company has failed products.

Also

If you check out the AllThingsDigital interview with Jobs he is very aware of what the challenges with Apple TV is.

http://allthingsd.com/20100607/steve-jobs-at-d8-the-full-unc...

But here is the difference again.

He isn't abandoning it. In fact the new Apple TV is an attempt at solving that problem. Or put another way. He wanted to solve it.

You really think that is an argument against what I said?

You know that google Earth, before being bought by Google, was made just because it provided a good intro to talks when he worked in Silicon Graphics?

People loved it so much that he realized he had "something".

Google just bought it when the product was complete.

Earth != Maps. Earth was a desktop application, and except for some very geeky tech enthusiasts, nobody used it. The innovativeness of Maps came from fusing some of the satellite imagery of Earth (done by Keyhole technologies) with the innovative UI (done by Where2 technologies, another acquisition, but one that used a C++-based browser plugin) with existing internal work on Google Local and Google's expertise with browser-based applications.

Very few innovations have a single parent, and very few products are ever "complete".

The iPod improved the lives of its users considerably more than Google's ads, which are its actual business.

How can you be so certain of the accuracy of your statement?

Who are the users of Google's ads? Companies wishing to increase the public's awareness of their products, those who wish to supplement their income with their written works and those looking to buy something.

How many livelihoods have been built around this market? How much easier has product discovery become?

The wheel is useless without the axle. If google's search results were awful, if they did not make it easier to find information that enriched people's lives - a powerful force in combating unwilful ignorance - do you think people would be there to click the ads in the first place?

Ads serve a useful purpose as a product awareness catalyst, they are a way of connecting seekers and sellers, if they did not help anyone they would not be so profitable. That they are abused and misused is not an inherent evil of the platform. Anything can be turned to nefarious purposes.

This is actually the perfect analogy, you just didn't realize it. The iPod came in to a world where there were already mp3 players, but they were all pretty lousy from a design/user standpoint. Apple won the mp3 player market because they built a better looking and easier to use version. Google search and maps won significant market share because they were technologically superior to the competition.

One isn't "better" than the other, but they are clearly successful for different reasons.

Actually, I'm guessing that Google's clean homepage and search results were a huge reason a lot of people switched over to it. It certainly had a lot to do with my choice.

Google Maps was also significantly better looking and easier to use than its competitors at the time (MapQuest with its clumsy non-moveable image tiles and interface).

If Google goes bankrupt tomorrow nobody would give a crap. People would just use Bing or Yahoo.

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It's a shame no one ever invented that sarcasm font. Would do really do the world a huge favor.

They did make the irony mark though. It's been a runaway success؟

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

I guess you missed his irony. "Pointless" was a straw man of his injection to make his argument seem stronger.

At the end of the day most of Google's non-search products have lacked great design, this is well publicized and not very controversial and Google has made some great strides recently towards better design (Matias Duarte's work on ICS most famously).

"most of Google's non-search products have lacked great design"

What about GMail? One of the reasons it was so successful, apart from the storage capacity, was the simple and elegant design, at least in my opinion.

I guess it's a matter of opinion but I always thought that Gmail was popular because of the spam filtering and the large amount of storage. Power users especially love it for the ton of features it offered along with support for keyboard shortcuts.

I never really liked the way Gmail was designed. It was functional but not very pretty.

Useful beats pretty. Look at where we are. Look at Wikipedia. These anti-engineers, pro-pretty design rants on HN are becoming really annoying. Look at pg website and tell me if it is "pretty". Shh...

>Useful beats pretty.

That wasn't my argument even though I made no argument and said it was a matter of opinion. What is useful to you does not mean it's useful for everyone or even most people.

>Look at Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is well designed as is Google search. In my opinion, Gmail is not a place where I want to look at emails constantly.

> These anti-engineers, pro-pretty design rants on HN are becoming really annoying.

What made you think I was ranting or 'anti-engineer' in my post? Everybody has their job, engineers as well as designers.

You said "I never really liked the way Gmail was designed. It was functional but not very pretty." which, I think, is showing a misunderstanding of design.

Good design is not "pretty" and has very few, mostly indirect links with aesthetics. One of the possible definitions for "good design" could be "don't need user's manual", and "test users took less than x seconds to find and perform tasks A, B and C".

>Good design is not "pretty" and has very few, mostly indirect links with aesthetics.

Good design is 'not necessarily' pretty but what I consider pretty is not in the traditional sense. I did say that both Wikipedia and Google search are well designed sites. Good design to me doen't mean it has to look like Apple or Outlook.

For me, even though I know Gmail's interface, I can't look at it for nine hours a day. It feels like I'm working just looking at the site, much less accomplishing the goals I set out to do through mail. For me, good design keeps things simple and obvious until I need something more advanced. I feel like almost everything in Gmail is being thrown at me at once even if that may not necessarily be the case.

This doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people and it doesn't mean you're wrong in what works for you.

As an aside, I have a mother who knows nothing about technology. I had to set up her Gmail account for her and sometimes she forgets her password. She can't even use Gmail on the web. She can only understand Mail.app. I think she is representative of the average user.

Gmail had the Web2.0 style interface, everyone else had clunky, slow interfaces at the time; Yahoo Mail, for example, only moved to a similar responsive feeling interface much later. The design of the UI was also cleaner; it felt like the others had "junk" all over the page. The storage capacity was a huge plus as well.

Gmail was popular for the storage as both have mentioned and most of all the exclusivity. I certainly didn't beg my friend Bill for an invite when I found out he had Gmail because of the spam filters or ui or so I could have ads in my mail. I wanted Gmail because Google was the coolest kid on the block.

(Sarcasm)

When it launched, was Google Search that much better than Yahoo Search? Was Google Maps that much better than MapQuest?

I'd say the leap from a Discman to an iPod was a bit bigger. Suddenly, you didn't have to choose which music to take with you, it was already all there in the device. Suddenly, you could take your music player when you went jogging, because the music would never skip. Suddenly, you wouldn't have to worry about damaging your CDs, you would always have a copy. You wouldn't even have to think about changing batteries or charging -- the battery would charge while you synced your iPod to iTunes.

> was Google Search that much better than Yahoo Search? Was Google Maps that much better than MapQuest?

Dear God yes. It was night and day better. MapQuest back then was clunky as shit, and nothing gave better and faster results than Google when it came on the scene, and certainly the speed and clean interface were unmatched. Suddenly you could find anything you wanted on the internet, easily and without hassle.

The iPod, by the way, was not the first MP3 player.

Its unfortunate that some people didn't see, or don't remember, this transition. It was literally going from something that just plain didn't work, to magic.

The memory that stands out in my mind was typing in 3 or 4 words from a song I heard on the radio, appending "lyrics" and having Google know what I was talking about. It stands in my mind as one of those "this is the future" moments. We take it for granted now, but this new normal of never missing out on information, because you can just google it, really did start with Google in my opinion.

When Google started out, I could get way more relevant results from using a combination of Yahoo, Hotbot and AltaVista.

Later on, Google got better and I switched because I could get satisfactory results from just one search engine. You didn't have to think about which search engine to use for which query -- Google was good enough.

Nowadays, I wouldn't miss Google Search if it disappeared; I get more relevant results from DuckDuckGo.

Google Search gave much better results which is really what made it better.

The UI was nice and clean and had 2 buttons, one of which was pointless.

That said I doubt Steve was talking about Google Search when he lumped Google in with Microsoft. He was likely talking about Android 1.x and 2.x.

I think it is disingenuous to suggest there was a "leap" from the Discman to the iPod considering that mp3 players were around for at least 4 years prior to the iPod's introduction.

Apple certainly nailed the modern mp3 player in terms of what the mainstream user was looking for (easily usable UI, music store integration, etc), but they hardly "leaped" from the Discman/portable CD to the iPod.

Grandparent was talking about how different technologies improved people's lives.

The vast majority of consumers didn't go from a Discman to a Flash MP3 player or a 3.5" HD music player to an iPod. They went straight from a Discman to an iPod. The Flash MP3 players at the time had very little storage space (128MB or less) which wasn't any better than using a MP3 CD in a Discman, and the 3.5" HD players were bulky and expensive. I doubt that anywhere near 1 million 3.5" HD players were sold, while more than 300 million iPods have been sold.

Plenty of people went from playing mp3s on their desktops and/or laptops to playing them on an iPod. That leap is also a lot smaller than the leap from a Discman.

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