Best part is Job's last comment: By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Creating something of value is hard. It takes dedication, iteration, consistent work, focus, and sacrifice. And to do it again and again? Rare.
Apple - regardless of motivation - has done that under Jobs. The sales show the result. I'd respect him, a doer, above a talker like Gawker any day.
That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.
Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product.
His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates.
Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.
> "You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is."
This is a fairly standard "engineering" view of the world. It is also why 90% of startups go out of business.
> "The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd."
That is one alternative, but certainly not the only alternative. You could also get out and talk to your potential customers, find out what their problems are and what it would take to solve them, then build what THEY think is right. The nice side effect is you'll already know who the consumer is.
As a customer, I do have a stake in something when I put down my credit card. If a company doesn't respect me as their customer, you bet I will not be repeating my business.
However, the business can (and SHOULD) decide if they want me as a customer. If they don't, they should make it clear. I think Apple does this very well: You are given the Apple sandbox that is very well defined. If you don't like it, don't buy Apple (yet, people still do, then bitch forever about it).
I think that every business should listen to its customers, though obviously not without having a grand vision in mind. That will mean losing customers, but each business has a risk at its heart.
I think rejecting Flash is part of a vision I'd want to buy into (and have, I type this on an iPad). There are going to me more tradeoffs like this, and in Apple's case I think they're going to be consistent with a product-centric vision.
So far I like that product and what it's turning into, so I think Apple is taking the right risk.
The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me.
Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.
I totally agree with you. That seemed to shut up the Gawker blogger. You can't please everybody and it isn't worth trying. And if you try to, you end up with a crappy product nobody wants and it's so far from your vision of what it should be. It takes guts to do what Jobs does. He's not doing this to be Mr Popular.
Despite what you may think of Jobs, he's pulled his company from horrible performance and has created value over and over. Anybody can talk smack and criticize. It takes will, dedication and passion do create.
Without expressing an opinion about the value of Apple products, I would be careful about implying a causation between a product's sales and its value or "greatness".
Sounds like you're saying your respect goes to the businessmen and marketers of the world, if your primary criteria for greatness are sales, market cap, stock price, etc. Those might sometimes correlate with creativity and technical merit, but they certainly aren't directly measures of it (and often don't correlate).
To put it differently: What has Jobs made in the past 10 years? I don't mean: what have employees over which he's had supervision as CEO made. What has Jobs made? Is he really a "builder and hacker"? My impression of the early days is that he wasn't even then: Woz was the builder and hacker; Jobs was the suit.
The ceo of a company is responsible for success and failure. When I was in the Army, the success or failure of my squad rested with me - I was ultimately responsible.
So, yes, in this case, the guy who took apple from the dumps to one of the biggest consumer devices companies in the world, he gets credit.
That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done.
CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did.
And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.
I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.
I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though).
I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.
I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again.
Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, vision, and execution. I wouldn't want to work with Jobs - but I admire what he's done. Apple would not be here without his vision and leadership.
On leadership, yeah, I do believe that ultimately, a leader is responsible and accountable. Whether it's the leader of a fire-team in Iraq, the leader of a country, or a four-man startup in Mountain View.
My very personal view: we'd be better off as a society if leaders were held responsible for success and failure. I see too many leaders / ceos / politicians taking credit for success and pointing to anybody but them for failures.
What bothers me about the tone of his statement is that it puts down anybody who doesn't make something "great". Great being narrowly defined as "making a metric ass load of money".
Additionally, he's presuming credit for the work Apple's engineers and designers have done. There is no doubt that Jobs guidance, and decision making has pulled Apple from the ashes. But he's not personally writing up engineering documents or slinging code.
My wife made some meatloaf today for the very first time. I thought it was pretty "great". Does that mean Jobs thinks that she's worth his consideration now? Or only if she puts the recipe out and made a metric ass load of money? I gave her the recipe, should I just take all the credit?
By defining "make" in a way that implies Jobs' participation in the process beyond those normally assigned to a CEO, and conflating credit and accountability with the process of actually "making" something, implies that he gets the credit for the late nights up writing code, testing out production designs, and all the other things that Jobs most certainly did not do is wrong.
If the world worked that way, with people taking credit for other's work, it would make for a pretty shitty place.
I think you are stretching a little here. Jobs (to make sure we are talking about the same "he") never once brought in any mention of money. His point is a fairly common viewpoint: it's easy to tear things apart but much harder to build them; before tearing other people's things apart, try building something yourself first.
I, obviously, can't say what Jobs would consider great. I think that question is meaningless, though. If somebody asked me the same question Jobs asked, the definition of great would be my own.
He tells people what to build. He's very good at it, but he doesn't build things himself. Vision is cheap; negative taste [1][2] is easy; it's the implementation that counts.
I have no problem valuing the industrial engineers who figured out how to make the iPad 13 mm thick more than Jobs who decided it would be 13 mm thick.
Right. Seriously -- what did you mean by "authoritas"? Normally, employees, including engineers, do what you tell them to do. Knowing what is possible and borderline possible and when is also an important part of Jobs's skill set, but still is nowhere near actually doing it in my eyes.
Perhaps there's a distinction to be made between building the individual components and building 'the product'. Obviously, Jobs doesn't do the former, certainly not by hand. But he's very much involved in product development throughout the entire design cycle: initial vision, product definition, decisions about integration with other services, constant iteration of software and hardware (this is where he's said to be very hands on, constantly using the product and giving direction), final spec/price points, packaging, and marketing. This creation of a complete product is what has made Apple so successful in the last decade and seems to me to clearly be the 'building' of a product.
Anyway, if vision and negative taste are cheap and easy, why don't more tech companies seem to have them? It doesn't at all seem to me that the trait that makes Apple stand out is that they have engineers that are head and shoulders above the rest of the industry. Not at all. Apple's engineers are good, but hardly unique in their ability to make 13mm thick tablet computers. It's that they have taste and vision and they execute on top of them.
I would say any startup CEO worth their salt. and most cases, esp on HN, they're actually involved in building it, not just telling people that it must be built.
Those unbiased metrics are a good measure of the entirety of a company's or a division's performance, but they tell us little about the product itself in absence of consideration of its marketing, competition, relevant social attitudes, and a plethora of other market factors which to a large degree determine the "success" of a product.
Agreed on more respect for the creators than for the talkers, though.
> By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Yes, let's hi-light and praise what's probably one of the most absolute jerkiest part of the exchange.
You don't have to make something popular to do something great. And no matter how great Jobs thinks he is, he didn't personally create most of the things Apple puts out -- the team of dedicated employees at Apple did. Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same.
Then why would he say it? The implication that he thinks he's done something great is clear (not saying that he hasn't done great things, but the semantics of his statement are clear, "go away guy who hasn't made billions of dollars and come back when your bank account is full").
I didn't read anything about the relation between greatness and bank accounts. It seems like you want to paint him according to your existing preconceptions. I read, "I really do take this stuff to heart, and you're telling me I'm just in it for the money.". I'd probably fire back something similar at 2 am (and regret it in the morning).
I thought Steve Jobs main role at Apple was to "criticize others' work and belittle their motivations"? Didn't some of the early Apple employee's give him a rubber stamp with "this is shit" carved into it so he wouldn't have to waste time writing his feedback on their work?
Creating something of value is hard. It takes dedication, iteration, consistent work, focus, and sacrifice. And to do it again and again? Rare.
Apple - regardless of motivation - has done that under Jobs. The sales show the result. I'd respect him, a doer, above a talker like Gawker any day.