If anyone hasn't seen it, the documentary The Pixar Story is on Netflix Instant. It's a great documentary that features a few interviews with Steve Jobs and tells of the rise of Pixar.
From the Marin Independent Journal, the paper of the Ed Catmull's home: "Some people put marketing at the top of ... the success for the business," Catmull added. "What he did was he made the quality of what he was working on the most important thing."
This is completely true. When Pixar bought Disney for -7 billion it completely changed the atmosphere at the Disney Animation studio. The first thing Ed and John did was fire all of the executives who were making story decisions and let the storytellers go back to telling stories. There's still a lot of work to be done but things are finally back on the right track.
"Quality is the best business plan" -- John Lasseter
Why are you all paying so much attention to this man? He did nothing good with his life, just distracted a lot of people with shiny stuff while reaching into their pockets. He did so in a creative way, but this is hardly someone to be praised for his accomplishments.
I don't understand why this troll post hasn't been down voted into the background by now. What Steve did that was so important was he finally started forcing technology to bend to our whims instead of the other way around.
I remember when I finally bought my first Apple anything: a unibody MBP. I had played around with the new mouse pad for hours in various stores before I finally decided I was going to make the switch. For the development I do at home Windows was always the worst platform anyway, so why not. I took the thing home and had everything set up in a way I could use in less than an hour. After never having touched OSX before. When I contrast that with the ~2 days of screwing around I always had with each new windows installation (which had to be repeated per machine for every upgrade and sometimes as normal maintenance!) it was really eye opening.
Then the iPad came out and pushed that even further. Now instead of having a dedicated room with a desktop setting in it, most people can have a magazine sitting on their coffee table that happens to also do everything they needed a computer for. That's a huge step forward and I honestly don't know when we would have ever saw it if Steve didn't show us the way.
He didn't cure cancer but he was a hacker like us who had effects far outside his domain.
These ideas were always obvious in our culture. Slick, touch screen devices were in films long before the iPhone. I applaud him for the execution and marketing but that's it.
There is nothing exciting about locking a platform down and having a reliable end product either. Linux - completely flexible, unpopular as a desktop OS; Windows - partially locked down, popular but not loved; Mac OS - completely locked down, not widespread but loved. Controlling a tight environment is an order of magnitude easier. Someone was going to take that corner of the market and it just happened to be him. I would call someone like this an anti-hacker for he lived with a philosophy which was distinctly against the grain of hacker culture and his own technical ability was sub-par. He was an entrepreneur, a great one at that.
The issue I have is that this is considered to be such important news when people who have made more than a superficial impact on the world (innovating luxury goods is about as far from that as I can imagine) are completely ignored here when they perish.
Then why did the iPod/iPhone/iPad come from Apple and not Produce?
>which was distinctly against the grain of hacker culture
Really? All the dev tools I use work better on Mac than windows. I don't really care how well they work on Linux because the Linux desktop makes me spend too much time doing something I don't care about: administration (which is why I dropped Windows too, btw).
>and his own technical ability was sub-par.
Nice, everyone loves judgmental people. Even if you're right, who cares? As you say, he was a great entrepreneur. In some ways, that's the greatest of hacking: hacking the world into wanting something you've made.
>innovating luxury goods is about as far from that as I can imagine
Again, he put the computer in our hands in a way that no one had before (at least not to that level). If we ever get to the star trek or minority report (the good technology parts) world, what Jobs made will be the first steps of the stairs that take us there. That's not a "superficial" impact.
>Then why did the iPod/iPhone/iPad come from Apple and not Produce?
Because an entrepreneur called Steve Jobs delivered the product first. Just because a concept is in the culture it doesn't mean that it has been realised.
>Really? All the dev tools I use work better on Mac than windows. I don't really care how well they work on Linux because the Linux desktop makes me spend too much time doing something I don't care about: administration (which is why I dropped Windows too, btw).
I have no experience with their dev tools so I can't comment on that. Hacker culture is one of freedom and exploration. If you're going to argue that Apple somehow represent those values then we should just move on to the next point.
>Nice, everyone loves judgmental people.
Just like everyone loves judging these words I'm typing?
>Even if you're right, who cares? As you say, he was a great entrepreneur. In some ways, that's the greatest of hacking: hacking the world into wanting something you've made.
The common word for that is marketing.
>Again, he put the computer in our hands in a way that no one had before (at least not to that level). If we ever get to the star trek or minority report (the good technology parts) world, what Jobs made will be the first steps of the stairs that take us there. That's not a "superficial" impact.
No, the first steps were made by Xerox, IBM, Stanley Kubrick, the writers of Star Trek, and various others. This is very far from the first step - the concept was already in place, material industries already had the capability to create things like gorilla glass, there were already hundreds of prototypes (i.e. the initial tablet PC's). Jobs did what any good business man does, he saw an opportunity and took it, to which I respond with an emphatic 'so what?'. It's like crack dealers say - 'if I don't sell it, someone else will'. That's the rule of business. Yet why do we forget that it wasn't Jobs who put in all of those thousands (millions?) of man-hours to develop these products? He provided some non/functional requirements then people who are competent with technology brought them to fruition. Why is one person saying 'this is good' or 'this is bad' get so much attention yet the people who did the work are not only forgotten about but have their labor attributed to someone else? One could argue that it wouldn't have happened without him. Well it wouldn't have happened without the 20,000 other people either.
Honestly, if I'm going to idolize someone then it damn well better be someone who's made humanity better off by helping to solve it's perpetual problems or exploring the boundaries of what we know. This is so boring in comparison. Someone packaged up existing stuff into a polished product and sold it to lots of people. I really don't get it.
And to everyone calling me a troll, that word is reserved for people who feign a type of personality in order to bait others into becoming angry. This is my opinion and I can assure you that I am not trolling.
>If you're going to argue that Apple somehow represent those values then we should just move on to the next point.
Mac OSX is quite open [1]. No, their IOS devices aren't as open and I'm glad of that. IOS devices are appliances, not full power computers [2]. That means I don't have to fiddle with it to get it to work. It just works, or it's defective so I replace it. Most people aren't geeks and shouldn't be forced to be. Hollywood doesn't force us to take stage acting classes just to watch a movie. We shouldn't make using the Internet something one needs a class for.
>Honestly, if I'm going to idolize someone
Do you know what this site is about? It's largely about entrepreneurship. Steve did what we all dream of: he followed his dream and managed to change the world. Did he solder every chip, carve out ever piece of plastic by hand? Of course not. No one man could do all those things. But it was his vision and he did what it took to make it happen.
> IOS devices are appliances, not full power computers [2]. That means I don't have to fiddle with it to get it to work. It just works, or it's defective so I replace it. Most people aren't geeks and shouldn't be forced to be.
This is exactly why Apple is anti-hacker.
>Hollywood doesn't force us to take stage acting classes just to watch a movie. We shouldn't make using the Internet something one needs a class for.
Yet we spend years learning how to operate the human machine. Yet more years learning how to communicate with other humans. Learning how to use a pen. How to walk. How to read, write and do math. How to ride and repair a bike. If the internet is considered a basic essential utility by the UN then why should people not be educated on it as they are with math? Why should this class of tools require no learning when all other tools do?
To go off on a slight tangent, why is it so widely accepted that everything should be easy and require no thought? Since when do we celebrate ignorance? Did I miss a memo? There is a clear benefit to understanding your tools which is that they become more effective. Not to mention that one is also able to fix and tailor them to one's needs. We're getting extremely efficient and at the same time incredibly stupid. Should the house of cards fall down, not many will know what to do. Anyway, this goes back to the trade-off between efficiency and robustness. I feel that we are too far in the former direction.
>Do you know what this site is about? It's largely about entrepreneurship. Steve did what we all dream of: he followed his dream and managed to change the world. Did he solder every chip, carve out ever piece of plastic by hand? Of course not. No one man could do all those things. But it was his vision and he did what it took to make it happen.
Like I said, I respect his entrepreneurship but, personally, I think that it's foolish to idolize a businessman, or anyone who makes greed their life, for that matter. There are countless people more deserving of this level of attention.
Because they get the technology out of my way unless I want to know? It's bizarre enough to have this stance at all, but to want to force it on others?
>Yet we spend years learning how to operate the human machine.
We all learn the things that are part of our expertise and try to avoid learning things beyond that. Can you fix your car if it breaks down (well, from the sound of you, you probably can to some extent)? I don't know how and I don't want to know how. I just want it to do what I bought it to do. I don't care why or how it works. The only thing I have to learn about a car is just the bits I need to get it to do the job I bought it for.
It is naive and unrealistic to expect everyone to be an expert of everything. And why do they need to learn how to administer a linux server just because they want to look up some information that happens to be online?
>To go off on a slight tangent, why is it so widely accepted that everything should be easy and require no thought?
This is certainly a tangent. Things should scale with use. If I'm a sales guy I don't want to know anymore about a computer than I absolutely must. I have a million things I have to know to sell, why burden my mind with information that has nothing to do with that? I don't care about password security or any of that nonsense. I need to check what other people are asking/saying (email) and be able to create slide shows.
>Since when do we celebrate ignorance?
On the contrary, it's takes someone truly brilliant to make something so simple that you don't have to "learn" it to use it.
>There is a clear benefit to understanding your tools which is that they become more effective.
And for those that need that, it exists. Just don't force it on the 99.9999% who don't need it.
>I feel that we are too far in the former direction.
I feel we're not remotely far enough in the efficiency direction. There are still far to many underpinnings showing.
>makes greed their life
Greed? Do you mean as in; for money? He wanted to change the world. How could it be greed? First of all; he became even more focused when he found out he was going to die (what good would even more money do him them) and second; he wasn't taking pay for what he was doing!
I feel that I've misrepresented my stance - I think that everyone should do as they see fit. I don't want to impose my view on anyone, but I do want to present clear, rational arguments which make people question their assumptions.
I'm mostly referring to the culture of specialisation - my take on it is similar to Robert Heinlein's, namely that "Specialization is for Insects". I don't mean this in a condescending way, but rather as a motivation to achieve bigger and better things. I've heard Job's himself being described as a polymath. I don't think that he would have had the vision that he did if he hadn't explored many areas of life and consolidated them into his world view. In fact, it's ironic that someone who expanded his mind so much didn't advocate the same for others.
>We all learn the things that are part of our expertise and try to avoid learning things beyond that. Can you fix your car if it breaks down (well, from the sound of you, you probably can to some extent)? I don't know how and I don't want to know how. I just want it to do what I bought it to do. I don't care why or how it works. The only thing I have to learn about a car is just the bits I need to get it to do the job I bought it for.
>It is naive and unrealistic to expect everyone to be an expert of everything. And why do they need to learn how to administer a linux server just because they want to look up some information that happens to be online?
Ofcourse it's unrealistic, this is from the perspective of an ideal. I think that each person's ideal is shaped by their assumptions. When considering the assumptions of a specialised society, it seems to be focused on making life as painless as possible while at the same time producing as much as it can. The assumptions I'm working with are that hardship and pushing one's self to go above and beyond what's merely necessary are tools for personal growth and development. I think that we all have the potential to be Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein but that our culture tends to discourage us from reaching our potential.
I know from experience that having a wide knowledge of things brings about unexpected benefits. The reason for this seems to be that all things are connected to and affected by each other. For example, when Chaos Theory was being developed, due to the fact that scientists in different fields and mathematicians were so disconnected from each other's domains, it took longer than it should for the full implications of the theory to propagate through the scientific domain. Had the mathematicians been trained in multiple sciences, these links would have been found much faster.
When one casts his net wide then he can see that the patterns found in one domain tend to pop up in other domains. That's not to say that knowledge should only be wide, it needs to be deep too. Due to the time constraints, a balance must be found. What has worked well for me is developing a deep knowledge of one domain (computer science) and more shallow knowledge of multiple domains (neurochemistry, philosophy, psychology, poetry, social interation, mysticism and music). I feel extremely ignorant after having done this because it has brought to my attention the sheer range of knowledge and how little I've covered, in spite of casting that net out. The other benefit is an increased tolerance of opposing views - after some time you see that everyone is mostly the same, whichever domain they're working in, yet they find it difficult to relate to each other because of superficial differences like the language used to describe things.
>Greed? Do you mean as in; for money? He wanted to change the world. How could it be greed? First of all; he became even more focused when he found out he was going to die (what good would even more money do him them) and second; he wasn't taking pay for what he was doing!
I'll admit that it's not my place to talk about the man's personal motivations, I didn't know him. The actions taken by him and Apple, however, do have the colour of greed painted on them. He certainly did change the world, but as others have argued, he utilised an approach based on fear and greed. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Richard Stallman who has dedicated his life to providing the whole world with building blocks on which this very medium we're communicating on stands - and all for free!
To summarise, I feel that our culture is taking an extreme approach with specialisation and would benefit from finding a middle ground. The benefits are real and would make a difference to everyone's quality of life. At the same time, nobody should be forced to do anything, this is more about convincing than forcing.
so you think your small bitter self, fuelled by a few thing you've read written by other small bitter people, understands Jobs better than the people who've spent decades working alongside him? piss of back to 4chan
It's just my opinion, which I am entitled to. Also, show me what's wrong with the world ("your small bitter self") and I'll show you what's wrong with you ("piss of back to 4chan").
