Hah... I remember I went to a tradeshow - I think it was the CeBit and can't remember the year, must've been before '93.
NeXT had a booth there and I remember asking the folks if it ran on Intel processors.
I distinctly the remember all the folks there laughing at me as if that was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard and asking me to move right along.
According to the article, Apple's CEO said they chose NeXT over Be because "In the end it came down to NeXT already supporting Intel and that was important to us".
Why was running on Intel important to Apple? Apple didn't use Intel at that time (Dec 1996), and didn't decide to use Intel until much later (announced 2005)? Whereas BeOS already did run on the CPU platform that Apple did use at that time?
I purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine became less crashy but performace was always poor.
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
How long would it have taken to get BeOS on Intel to OS X 10.5 level?
Or, perhaps Apple was considering switching earlier than they did. Maybe they thought G3->G4 was going to experience the problems that didn't end up cropping up until G4->G5.
Apple was working on X86 compatibility as early as Mac OS 7 in 1992. [1]
It's because back then, if I remember correctly, new revisions of Macintoshes with PowerPC processors had CPU speed increments like, 80, 90, 100mhz, and meanwhile the Pentium was going 100, 200, 300, 400... (at least that's how it felt being a mac user...)
Also, I believe around that time the deal between IBM and Motorola was ending and they had already decided not to continue development of the PowerPC.
I think they knew at the time that Motorola processors weren’t quite living up to their promise. Theory didn’t seem to line up with practice and while they were technically faster per clock it didn’t always translate to performance. Intel also cleared some pretty incredible technical hurdles during this time period as well.
I’ve no doubt that internally Apple engineers knew this.
At the time Apple was licensing MacOS to clone manufacturers like Power Computing. It's likely they thought the only way to grow the clone business was to open the floodgates to Intel PC clone manufacturers.
Of course the NeXT merger brought back Steve Jobs who killed the clone program immediately.
NeXT was far, far more mature as an OS than BeOS. For years, people had been shipping mission-critical custom software on NeXT.
You had Improv, which when Lotus killed it, was cloned into Quantrix which is still sold today to financial modelers.
You had the McCaw Cellular custom app (don't know what it was called) that allowed them to grow - they later became Cingular, then ATT Wireless. William Morris Agency, Booz Allen Hamilton (big consulting firm), etc. all had custom apps that they used under NeXT.
In contrast, BeOS had a few small desktop apps and some other cool demos.
Great story. All too often - and particularly when it comes to Apple - there is a mythology that a company grows based solely on the decisions and leadership of one individual. The reality is that the vast majority of critical decisions are rooted in stories like this. Apple, Dell, MS, Sun, Oracle, etc.
The funny thing is I remember BeOS running on x86. Wikipedia says the first release containing that was 1998, which puts it a year or two after the NeXT acquisition. I wonder if these two facts have something to do with each other.
I can't imagine "doing the right thing" would not end up with immediate termination in the current "top" corporations running internal surveillance 24/7... Will there be ever a good time for accidental inventions again?
The Computer History Museum has one of their long form interviews with Avie Tevanian, who led the creation of Mach (multiprocessor BSD) as his Ph.D project. (His faculty advisor went on to head Microsoft Research)
Next and Microsoft both sought to hire him, and he eventually went on to be in charge of the OS at Next and later Apple.
One of the topics he covered in the interview was how Next (and Apple) decided to use and contribute back to open sourced software at the lower levels of their stack.
He also covers what it was like to work for Steve Jobs.
No, because with BSD license companies are free to withhold their code.
NeXT was never about UNIX, rather the foundation libraries, UI Builder and everything that was possible to do with Objective-C, including writing device drivers.
UNIX compatibility was a way to embrace the software of the blooming market of UNIX workstation startups, and fill a checkmark on the requirements list.
That's a good question, although I wouldn't characterize it as antithetical to his beliefs.
I'd wager it was far more expeditious to develop on top of a professional-grade OS than to start over from scratch. He wanted to sell high-end hardware, and it's hard to do that with a primitive operating system.
Anyway, interesting question, would also like to know how that decision was made.
I don't know the story, but 4.3BSD, which went into NeXTStep, was not open source. It wasn't until 4.4BSD that BSD was available without a paid Unix license.
NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but eventually backed down under legal threat.
I've read a few of these articles from Cake now and I like how it looks but I find using CTRL+F doesn't work correctly. On this article it doesn't seem to pick up anything past the second post unless you go to that post, click on it, and then type in your search.
So now we've seen a few Steve Jobs stores like this, including the one from John Carmack. A recurring theme is that Steve is such a bonehead that his underlings have to do things to "manage him." Whether that be doing things behind his back, withholding information from him, controlling who he meets and talks to. You also read about people working insane hours to complete things which probably didn't merit it, just to please steve's whims.
Since there's a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it's important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.
Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
My opinion after working for him (and writing this story) is he couldn't see obvious things everyone else could see, but he could see things no one else could. I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of Apple, and it turned out he was right. Thank God he was stubborn enough to go forward with them. We all said it drove Gateway out of business, yada.
There is a maxim that the only things that matter in business are results and relationships. If you have those two things going for you, you can get anything done.
I am a developer, but it surprises me how many developers don’t get that. Geeks canonize Woz and say that he was the success behind Apple, but geeks are a dime a dozen. We can look at what Jobs accomplished without Woz and what Woz accomplished without Jobs as a case study.
Jobs got results because of his relationships. He could get anyone on the phone and get things done. No one else could have picked up the phone and called Gates and made the deal he made in 1997 that saved Apple (not the money, the promise of continuing to support Office on Mac). He was able to negotiate with the music industry in 2003 and the mobile carriers before the iPhone came out and completely usurp their power.
Most of the targets of Jobs wrath weren’t afraid of losing their jobs and stuck around because they didn’t have an alternative. Good developers in the right market can get a job before their last check clears.
They stayed because they believed in the vision. If I had a choice between working on the original iPhone and writing yet another software as a service CRUD app, I know which one I would have chosen.
But when the dust settled, I would have put that on my resume and wrote my own ticket to work almost anywhere.
It's unrealistic to expect any leader to know everything, understand everything, or even to consider every idea with rational equanimity.
The factor that comes through all these Steve Jobs stories is his incredibly strong drive to move forward. He didn't wait or equivocate... if he thought something was wrong, or he should hear from someone on a topic, he personally and immediately went after the very best information or person he could get. In my short career, it is striking how rare that seems, even among senior managers.
And if you think about it... those same traits are what you see demonstrated by the author in the linked story. He was worried that his company was headed in the wrong direction, so he personally and immediately went after the best solution he could think of: secretly calling the CEO of Intel!
The secret to reading these "Steve Jobs leadership" stories is that Jobs is usually not the only leader in the story.
lol. I'll assume that you've never run a bigger company before. It's literally everything, there is a story for everything. If you want to cut the leadership as being absentee, it's easy to track a thread back to absentee'ism leading to success, same for slave driving, got one for that. That problem once you get past a few 100 employees is that you'll find the narrative you want to craft.
The interesting take away here at least in my eyes is that incredibly seemingly irrelevant plot points become climaxes. The fact that they invested a bit into the Intel chip for reasons unrelate may have been the fulcrum for the most valuable company in the history of the world.
The more I read about him the more it feels like he had some sort of extremely high functioning borderline personality disorder. I know how unacceptable it is to label people as a layperson, but all of these articles where people were great friends then suddenly dead to him, and the stories of his rage events fits with a few people I know who suffer from this. It is such a strange disorder as some people are complete failures who fall into suicide and drug addiction, yet others go on to lead extremely successful projects and develop a cult of personality around them.
“Managing Upward” is part of just about every job I’ve ever had or seen. Influencing what your manager (or their manager, or their manager’s manager) needs to know, needs to decide on, or needs to escalate further is a critical part of getting things done in any hierarchical organization. When you work for someone, they are relying on you to apply a sane filter/judgment over the details coming up, just as much you rely on them to filter the shit that’s coming down. They also rely on you to “own” and take bold action on those things that are in their blind spots. The other comment about Jobs “not seeing obvious things and also seeing things nobody sees” is exactly right and applies to all good leaders.
> ...these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.
Yeah, work for that other asshole right out of McKinsey who perfectly matches the leadership templates in the management handbook written by another asshole out of HBS or McKinsey and have moved up the ladder in a hierarchical organization by perfectly playing politics and being diplomatic.
That's considered good leadership, by the management books, sure.
> But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
I don't know that you can separate the success from the flaws. It's hard to find truly impactful leaders that didn't have a large number of character flaws.
At the same time he had people talented enough to make these calls too.
He apparently worked with / found people who did these things without Steve knowing and it helped. If you had a bunch of yes men (or if that is what Steve had chosen) things would be different. Indirectly or directly he had people around him making these calls and it worked.
Not trying to dispute your statement at all, just add to it. Perhaps it illustrates how hiring knowledgeable, talented, passionate people is more about them doing the things you don't know they're going to do than say a resume or such... (I say that of course because I'm looking for a job and in that mindset). There is a video making the rounds on LinkedIn where Steve talks about hiring talented people and getting out of their way to some extent. Even apparently when he doesn't realize it (i'm sure he eventually figured some of it out).
Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley. Wozniak says it's the only one that's an accurate depiction of all of their personalities and schemes. It was budget but good. Noah Wyle stood out from the rest in acting skill.
> I think it's important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership.
Maybe not. Could also just be an example of manipulation on a higher level than what appears to be obvious.
For example take this part from the article:
> Steve spent all day in early Apple recruiting Bill Atkinson, a Phd student in neuroscience. Steve told me he didn’t know if they could have pulled off the Mac without him.
Seems like he is just complementing a brilliant guy, right?
Well maybe not. Maybe he is just manipulating a brilliant guy. In other words part of the plan is to appear to be boneheaded or not as smart. This is almost a cliche "I surround myself with people smarter than I am". As if 'being smart' can be definite the way winning a road race can (in absolute terms).
You find this sometimes also with guys who put their wife up on a pedestal intellectually. Maybe it's true but maybe it's also a way to get them in a place where they feel smarter and you get the benefits of that at no cost whatsoever. Women do this with men as well to get things they want from them.
Once again not saying Atkinson was or wasn't what Steve says but there are also methods to madness that have to be considered just the same.
Thanks for saying so. He certainly had talent, and some of his visions turned out to be true. But imagine what he could have done if he were just as visionary and had been a good manager!
And let's also take a moment to imagine all of the people he harmed with his abusive ways. E.g. how many marriages foundered because people worked insane hours? How many kid-parent relationships were harmed? How many people burned out and left the industry, or never did as much as they could?
>Since there's a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it's important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership.
Yeah, such poor leadership that he founded 3 huge multi-100 million companies (Apple, NeXT, Pixar) and turned the third one to the largest company of earth from its near-bankruptcy at the time he returned to it.
Perhaps what's "poor leadership" or not should be correlated with actual results?
According to Steve Wozniak "Steve couldn't code"[1].
Obviously being able to code is better than not being able to code! Steve succeeded despite never writing code, not because of it!
Can you imagine what kind of Supersteve we would have had if he learned to code! Rather than an Apple worth $0.95 trillion in 2018, might it be worth $3 trillion? $5 trillion? $30 trillion?
After all knowing how to code is obviously better than not knowing how to code!
Moral of the story: if you want to succeed like Steve don't be like Steve! If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.
(My comment is entirely sarcastic. It's a rebutt to your
>Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
NO. I don't agree with you that Steve accomplished what he accomplished despite the qualities, practices, influences, and decisions that made him Steve, and not because of them. In fact it's kind of a laughable claim as I hope my sarcastic "critique" that he didn't code, shows.)
Results matter and if your boss keeps delivering you boatloads of cash in the form of share value increases maybe there is something to be said about putting up with it.
I would call Jobs a "taste leader" (contrasting "thought leader." That is, he's someone you have to fit your work to the (very particular) aesthetic sensibilities of, if you have any hope of pursuing it. And I think this isn't an uncommon job-role, actually. Jobs wasn't uniquely flawed.
There are "taste leaders" in other fields—this is what a movie director is, or a chef, or a newspaper's editor-in-chief, or any master of a trade. It's a job-role that's all over the arts. It's just not seen much in science-driven, engineering-driven, or business-driven industries, because taste doesn't usually drive customer-demand in these fields. Apple's consumer-electronics niche is even an exception within their larger field. (I.e. taste certainly doesn't drive computing products in general—just look at the "gaming" PC peripherals on the top of the Amazon rankings to see what I mean.)
Usually, to get a project off the ground when a "taste leader" is in play, you have to ensure that your project is already to their tastes before they see it. That is, the taste-leader will can any project that doesn't currently fit their aesthetic, even if it might later fit their aesthetic. This is what forces the underlings of these people (in all of these fields) to work long hours, and to hide their work, and to lie about their work: they can't show it to the "taste leader" until it will suit their taste.
Why is this done? Why do taste leaders do this? It's a pretty universal trait of taste-leaders in successful businesses, so it's probably a good strategy somehow (if it's not just an effect of success.)
My guess is that taste-leaders do this for two reasons:
• They think that if they don't, a project will gain momentum while still not matching their tastes, and then they won't be able to stop it from "taking off" once it has enough smiling, happy faces invested in it. They just won't have the heart to can it at that point, even if they think it sucks. Much easier to can it early.
• They know that, by forcing everyone to adhere to this stringent set of aesthetic criteria at all times, they're imparting these same aesthetics to everyone around them. In order to please a taste leader, you can't just learn their tastes; you have to grok their tastes. Their tastes have to become your tastes. If you can't just iterate a project toward being something they like, but have to get it right from the start (or from the earliest point they're allowed to see it), then you have to be able to evaluate your own concept work against the aesthetic—and in fact use the aesthetic to figure out how to move across the fitness-landscape of possible features for the thing.
And, if those two things are true, then "taste leaders" are probably not as flawed as you think—rather, they're playing a role. Some might play it naturally, but I think that for a lot of them, they know that this is how to best drive their business toward optimizing for their taste (which they believe is a taste customers have demand for.)
That is: there are plenty of stories about people lying to Jobs. But did anyone ever get a chance to ask Jobs whether he knew they were lying, and just pretended to be oblivious to these skunkworks projects because he had faith in these people to eventually produce something he'd like (but just didn't want them showing their not-yet-aesthetic iterations off where others in the company could get excited about them)?
I've known both chefs and directors who do this sort of thing. Why would Jobs be different?
> A recurring theme is that Steve is such a bonehead that his underlings have to do things to "manage him." Whether that be doing things behind his back, withholding information from him, controlling who he meets and talks to. You also read about people working insane hours to complete things which probably didn't merit it, just to please steve's whims.
I feel like you can replace Steve Jobs name by Donald Trump and it still sounds true.
Everyone has their flaws, and a leader is also a member of a team.
What's impressive, to me, is that this leader was able to inspire his team to take such steps while sticking around instead of jumping ship. I think that's a big part of what makes a good leader; maintaining a team which wants to see you succeed, despite whatever flaws you may have.
[+] [-] linuxhansl|7 years ago|reply
NeXT had a booth there and I remember asking the folks if it ran on Intel processors.
I distinctly the remember all the folks there laughing at me as if that was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard and asking me to move right along.
Edit: Spelling.
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmsmith|7 years ago|reply
Why was running on Intel important to Apple? Apple didn't use Intel at that time (Dec 1996), and didn't decide to use Intel until much later (announced 2005)? Whereas BeOS already did run on the CPU platform that Apple did use at that time?
[+] [-] cmiles74|7 years ago|reply
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
[+] [-] dwighttk|7 years ago|reply
Or, perhaps Apple was considering switching earlier than they did. Maybe they thought G3->G4 was going to experience the problems that didn't end up cropping up until G4->G5.
Apple was working on X86 compatibility as early as Mac OS 7 in 1992. [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
[+] [-] peatmoss|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damon_c|7 years ago|reply
Also, I believe around that time the deal between IBM and Motorola was ending and they had already decided not to continue development of the PowerPC.
[+] [-] Tloewald|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|7 years ago|reply
I’ve no doubt that internally Apple engineers knew this.
[+] [-] warrenm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|7 years ago|reply
Of course the NeXT merger brought back Steve Jobs who killed the clone program immediately.
[+] [-] jldugger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
You had Improv, which when Lotus killed it, was cloned into Quantrix which is still sold today to financial modelers.
You had the McCaw Cellular custom app (don't know what it was called) that allowed them to grow - they later became Cingular, then ATT Wireless. William Morris Agency, Booz Allen Hamilton (big consulting firm), etc. all had custom apps that they used under NeXT.
In contrast, BeOS had a few small desktop apps and some other cool demos.
[+] [-] goatherders|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asveikau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeekyBear|7 years ago|reply
Next and Microsoft both sought to hire him, and he eventually went on to be in charge of the OS at Next and later Apple.
One of the topics he covered in the interview was how Next (and Apple) decided to use and contribute back to open sourced software at the lower levels of their stack.
He also covers what it was like to work for Steve Jobs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
NeXT was never about UNIX, rather the foundation libraries, UI Builder and everything that was possible to do with Objective-C, including writing device drivers.
UNIX compatibility was a way to embrace the software of the blooming market of UNIX workstation startups, and fill a checkmark on the requirements list.
[+] [-] macintux|7 years ago|reply
I'd wager it was far more expeditious to develop on top of a professional-grade OS than to start over from scratch. He wanted to sell high-end hardware, and it's hard to do that with a primitive operating system.
Anyway, interesting question, would also like to know how that decision was made.
[+] [-] enf|7 years ago|reply
NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but eventually backed down under legal threat.
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vasuvasu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballenf|7 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp...
[+] [-] starshadowx2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsdzvgfWE|7 years ago|reply
Since there's a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it's important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.
Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
[+] [-] cmacaskill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
I am a developer, but it surprises me how many developers don’t get that. Geeks canonize Woz and say that he was the success behind Apple, but geeks are a dime a dozen. We can look at what Jobs accomplished without Woz and what Woz accomplished without Jobs as a case study.
Jobs got results because of his relationships. He could get anyone on the phone and get things done. No one else could have picked up the phone and called Gates and made the deal he made in 1997 that saved Apple (not the money, the promise of continuing to support Office on Mac). He was able to negotiate with the music industry in 2003 and the mobile carriers before the iPhone came out and completely usurp their power.
Most of the targets of Jobs wrath weren’t afraid of losing their jobs and stuck around because they didn’t have an alternative. Good developers in the right market can get a job before their last check clears.
They stayed because they believed in the vision. If I had a choice between working on the original iPhone and writing yet another software as a service CRUD app, I know which one I would have chosen.
But when the dust settled, I would have put that on my resume and wrote my own ticket to work almost anywhere.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|7 years ago|reply
The factor that comes through all these Steve Jobs stories is his incredibly strong drive to move forward. He didn't wait or equivocate... if he thought something was wrong, or he should hear from someone on a topic, he personally and immediately went after the very best information or person he could get. In my short career, it is striking how rare that seems, even among senior managers.
And if you think about it... those same traits are what you see demonstrated by the author in the linked story. He was worried that his company was headed in the wrong direction, so he personally and immediately went after the best solution he could think of: secretly calling the CEO of Intel!
The secret to reading these "Steve Jobs leadership" stories is that Jobs is usually not the only leader in the story.
[+] [-] GoRudy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bksenior|7 years ago|reply
The interesting take away here at least in my eyes is that incredibly seemingly irrelevant plot points become climaxes. The fact that they invested a bit into the Intel chip for reasons unrelate may have been the fulcrum for the most valuable company in the history of the world.
[+] [-] borkt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehrdada|7 years ago|reply
Yeah, work for that other asshole right out of McKinsey who perfectly matches the leadership templates in the management handbook written by another asshole out of HBS or McKinsey and have moved up the ladder in a hierarchical organization by perfectly playing politics and being diplomatic.
That's considered good leadership, by the management books, sure.
[+] [-] macintux|7 years ago|reply
I don't know that you can separate the success from the flaws. It's hard to find truly impactful leaders that didn't have a large number of character flaws.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
He apparently worked with / found people who did these things without Steve knowing and it helped. If you had a bunch of yes men (or if that is what Steve had chosen) things would be different. Indirectly or directly he had people around him making these calls and it worked.
Not trying to dispute your statement at all, just add to it. Perhaps it illustrates how hiring knowledgeable, talented, passionate people is more about them doing the things you don't know they're going to do than say a resume or such... (I say that of course because I'm looking for a job and in that mindset). There is a video making the rounds on LinkedIn where Steve talks about hiring talented people and getting out of their way to some extent. Even apparently when he doesn't realize it (i'm sure he eventually figured some of it out).
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pirates+of+sili...
If you're fine with spoilers, look at Steve Jobs meets Bill Gates scene. Or a bunch of them. :)
[+] [-] gist|7 years ago|reply
Maybe not. Could also just be an example of manipulation on a higher level than what appears to be obvious.
For example take this part from the article:
> Steve spent all day in early Apple recruiting Bill Atkinson, a Phd student in neuroscience. Steve told me he didn’t know if they could have pulled off the Mac without him.
Seems like he is just complementing a brilliant guy, right?
Well maybe not. Maybe he is just manipulating a brilliant guy. In other words part of the plan is to appear to be boneheaded or not as smart. This is almost a cliche "I surround myself with people smarter than I am". As if 'being smart' can be definite the way winning a road race can (in absolute terms).
You find this sometimes also with guys who put their wife up on a pedestal intellectually. Maybe it's true but maybe it's also a way to get them in a place where they feel smarter and you get the benefits of that at no cost whatsoever. Women do this with men as well to get things they want from them.
Once again not saying Atkinson was or wasn't what Steve says but there are also methods to madness that have to be considered just the same.
[+] [-] wpietri|7 years ago|reply
And let's also take a moment to imagine all of the people he harmed with his abusive ways. E.g. how many marriages foundered because people worked insane hours? How many kid-parent relationships were harmed? How many people burned out and left the industry, or never did as much as they could?
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Yeah, such poor leadership that he founded 3 huge multi-100 million companies (Apple, NeXT, Pixar) and turned the third one to the largest company of earth from its near-bankruptcy at the time he returned to it.
Perhaps what's "poor leadership" or not should be correlated with actual results?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] logicallee|7 years ago|reply
Obviously being able to code is better than not being able to code! Steve succeeded despite never writing code, not because of it!
Can you imagine what kind of Supersteve we would have had if he learned to code! Rather than an Apple worth $0.95 trillion in 2018, might it be worth $3 trillion? $5 trillion? $30 trillion?
After all knowing how to code is obviously better than not knowing how to code!
Moral of the story: if you want to succeed like Steve don't be like Steve! If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.
(My comment is entirely sarcastic. It's a rebutt to your
>Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
NO. I don't agree with you that Steve accomplished what he accomplished despite the qualities, practices, influences, and decisions that made him Steve, and not because of them. In fact it's kind of a laughable claim as I hope my sarcastic "critique" that he didn't code, shows.)
[1]
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-never-wrote-compu...
[+] [-] meddlepal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|7 years ago|reply
There are "taste leaders" in other fields—this is what a movie director is, or a chef, or a newspaper's editor-in-chief, or any master of a trade. It's a job-role that's all over the arts. It's just not seen much in science-driven, engineering-driven, or business-driven industries, because taste doesn't usually drive customer-demand in these fields. Apple's consumer-electronics niche is even an exception within their larger field. (I.e. taste certainly doesn't drive computing products in general—just look at the "gaming" PC peripherals on the top of the Amazon rankings to see what I mean.)
Usually, to get a project off the ground when a "taste leader" is in play, you have to ensure that your project is already to their tastes before they see it. That is, the taste-leader will can any project that doesn't currently fit their aesthetic, even if it might later fit their aesthetic. This is what forces the underlings of these people (in all of these fields) to work long hours, and to hide their work, and to lie about their work: they can't show it to the "taste leader" until it will suit their taste.
Why is this done? Why do taste leaders do this? It's a pretty universal trait of taste-leaders in successful businesses, so it's probably a good strategy somehow (if it's not just an effect of success.)
My guess is that taste-leaders do this for two reasons:
• They think that if they don't, a project will gain momentum while still not matching their tastes, and then they won't be able to stop it from "taking off" once it has enough smiling, happy faces invested in it. They just won't have the heart to can it at that point, even if they think it sucks. Much easier to can it early.
• They know that, by forcing everyone to adhere to this stringent set of aesthetic criteria at all times, they're imparting these same aesthetics to everyone around them. In order to please a taste leader, you can't just learn their tastes; you have to grok their tastes. Their tastes have to become your tastes. If you can't just iterate a project toward being something they like, but have to get it right from the start (or from the earliest point they're allowed to see it), then you have to be able to evaluate your own concept work against the aesthetic—and in fact use the aesthetic to figure out how to move across the fitness-landscape of possible features for the thing.
And, if those two things are true, then "taste leaders" are probably not as flawed as you think—rather, they're playing a role. Some might play it naturally, but I think that for a lot of them, they know that this is how to best drive their business toward optimizing for their taste (which they believe is a taste customers have demand for.)
That is: there are plenty of stories about people lying to Jobs. But did anyone ever get a chance to ask Jobs whether he knew they were lying, and just pretended to be oblivious to these skunkworks projects because he had faith in these people to eventually produce something he'd like (but just didn't want them showing their not-yet-aesthetic iterations off where others in the company could get excited about them)?
I've known both chefs and directors who do this sort of thing. Why would Jobs be different?
[+] [-] m-p-3|7 years ago|reply
I feel like you can replace Steve Jobs name by Donald Trump and it still sounds true.
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
What's impressive, to me, is that this leader was able to inspire his team to take such steps while sticking around instead of jumping ship. I think that's a big part of what makes a good leader; maintaining a team which wants to see you succeed, despite whatever flaws you may have.
[+] [-] senatorobama|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gooftop|7 years ago|reply
(edit: oh I am slow today. Its told in story form, the meeting with Andy Grove is several posts down on the page).