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.
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.
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.
Every company has failed products.
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.
People loved it so much that he realized he had "something".
Google just bought it when the product was complete.
Very few innovations have a single parent, and very few products are ever "complete".
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.
One isn't "better" than the other, but they are clearly successful for different reasons.
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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).
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 never really liked the way Gmail was designed. It was functional but not very 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.