Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

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Right. Yeah I often do, possibly because I only have one word (marketing) for both.

I guess the storytelling is the part that I feel is overvalued. "This genius changed the world because of how he phrased it" seems like bullshit to me.

The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters. Even though I feel like there is a whole lot more luck involved than what people want to think. "Steve Jobs was a genius" may rather be "Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses".

It feels like there is a lot of survivorship bias (let me link xkcd myself before someone does: [1]) that we keep ignoring. "If Musk/Besos/Zuckerberg/<name your crazy billionaire> is where he is, that's most likely because he is the best". Ok, they probably did something right (maybe?), but they got crazy lucky as well.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1827/

> The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters

From the article "It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built."

The story is what kept the product development on track - and thus made the iPhone sell itself - the story isn't about convincing the public to buy, the story was an encapsulation of the products design - refined as time went on.

Product dev can easily go off the rails - take the recent story about Jeep having Ads popup on their infotainment systems - people wondering how anybody could think that's a good idea.

If you told a story about that product feature to your family and friends - you can be sure you'd get the 'puzzled look', and you'd remove it before the car ever shipped.

Apple doesn't really do a lot of classic sales. They have people with enterprise accounts and so forth but most of what they do to tell you about products and get people to write about them is fairly classic marketing.

But to your other point, sure. There is a saying about helping to make your luck, but, yes, there is also luck in just about any career or success.

> Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses

Jobs did it multiple times, though. The iPhone no doubt overshadows everything else, but the Macintosh and iPod serve as evidence that he had a recipe for successful products.

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