even if the cost is other people? your last statement is a dangerous stance.
He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings.
Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And there is a benefit to delighting people.
I see a lot of people fixated on the, let's face it, pretty mundane human costs, unable to see what he actually accomplished. I don't want these people to be leaders, and in my opinion we are in a worse position when these people become leaders. They harm the rest of us because they cannot overcome their fixation on a few pitiable people to see the larger picture.
The problem I have is that these attitudes are fragile. If you have a monarch, for example, with complete control over a country and who has tons of money and doesn't need to ask for permission, he can build a great nation of he's a good person.
When he dies and his son, who's an asshole but equally determined and powerful, takes over, now you have a bad situation.
Fortunately Steve Jobs wasn't in such control. But the point is that, yeah, if someone that determined and set in their ways and they're right...awesome!
But when people are like that and they're wrong, which happens a lot...god damn it's not good.
So I guess the question is whether this sort of "riskiness" is good? Like, when you win a horse race it's badass. The other 9 times out of 10 when you lose it sucks. Is that the human behavior we should model ourselves after? Interesting...
And keep in mind that bad people won't care about these arguments. Only good people with reasonable and healthy self-doubt will be convinced to make less of an impact, and that's the opposite of what we should want.
Specifically I wanted to contrast between populist politicians and business leaders who'd rather save face and avoid admitting to mistakes.
As someone mentioned in this post all he did was hurt people's feelings. Boo hoo!
Anyway, the reason I'm "trotting this out" is because to say all he did was hurt feelings is ignorant. He hurt feelings and perpetuated a supply chain with a lot of negative elements to it. And no, Apple is not the only company doing it. But I'm looking at some of the negative elements Steve Jobs had. Yes, he was rude to people. Also, he took part in a labor practice that I think is messed up, personally. That's all.
Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes!
Given the number of Foxconn employees [3] (over 1 million) and the average suicide rate in China (13.8 per 100,000 per year), that's potentially 138 suicides of Foxconn employees per year.
Wired did an article on the suicides, there were 11 of them [4], to paraphrase the article "The nets went up after the 11th jumper took their life in less than a year.".
So there were another 127 people to kill themselves to get up to the national average in that year. The whole issue was a load of FUD. I bet you own heaps of junk that was made in China in factories with worse conditions. If you live in a first world country, it's inevitable.
You my friend, in Jobs' parlance, are a bozo!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... [2] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html [3] http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-... [4] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1
Your math is off by 10x. 11.1 per 100k * 300M/100k = 33,000 not 300,000.
The rest of your comment is still valid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
those suicides were still associated with work conditions at foxconn, regardless of whether the suicide is higher in the general population.
That means, conservatively, that people who work at Foxconn are 7x LESS likely to commit suicide than in the general population.
11x LESS likely if you don't do intellectually dishonest things as counting attempts as successful suicides.
People also kill themselves over Tamagotchis. Suicidal people find a reason. So unless there's actually evidence of a higher-than-normal rate of suicide, the whole line of argument is a red herring.