What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/26/steve-jobs-apple-1997/

by hn • 17 years ago

69 47 17 years ago

10ren2• 17 years ago

So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself.

I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).

Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of Graham Chapman:

[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather, the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python

swombat• 17 years ago

Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better

Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable, complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of surrounding yourself with great people and getting them all working together is underrated.

Even if Steve Jobs contributed nothing to the ideas that were developed (which is unlikely, based on what I've heard), he still deserves the praise for being the human gravitational well that pulled all those people to work together and create awesome products.

kjhgftgyui2• 17 years ago

And do it consistently - a lot of CEOs talk about this stuff. But then when it comes near the end of the financial quarter or a big customer asks for something, or there is a rumor of a competitor the plan all changes.

symesc• 17 years ago

Agree completely.

Jobs himself has said what Apple (and he) has compared to others is "taste." I believe that to be true.

In relation to the human side (leading people), what Jobs has going for him is "judgement."

The older I get, the thing that attracts me to certain leaders is good judgement. Without that, a leader is a manager and not a very good one.

10ren2• 17 years ago

I hope you don't think I wasn't praising him in that line.

Anechoic• 17 years ago

Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).

Link? IIRC the term "iPod" was intended to be used for another product that may have preceeded Jobs' return but I this is the first I've heard about a portable mp3 player being developed at Apple before Jobs came back.

boucher• 17 years ago

Not a particularly good source, but I've heard this several times over the years. The iPod was developed in six months:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-more-th...

philwelch4• 17 years ago

No, the iPod was in development outside of Apple but Fadell had trouble getting investment.

kjhgftgyui2• 17 years ago

But was Fadell going to create itunes, and run a brilliant marketing campaign to persuade people to pay 10x as much as an MP3 player from Walmart?

Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.

pkaler• 17 years ago

The Apple ][ fundamentally changed the personal computer. The Macintosh fundamentally changed operating systems. Pixar fundamentally changed the film industry. The iTunes music store fundamentally changed the way music is distributed. The iPod fundamentally changed the way music is listened to. The iPhone fundamentally changed the mobile phone industry.

Sure, there were predecessors and prototypes. Sure, he had a ton of help. I count more than 3 decades of contribution so far. How many times does he have to be at the helm of a fundamental change before we stop having this discussion?

chris100• 17 years ago

The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique.

Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.

Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...

That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.

Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)

Tichy9• 17 years ago

I must admit that this article rather made me realize that most of what Apple did is just to create some fancy looking PCs. The iPhone was revolutionary indeed, but overall the achievements seem overblown.

I still think that Steve Jobs is cool, though.

tfh2• 17 years ago

> just to create some fancy looking PCs

that's not true..

Tichy9• 17 years ago

How is it not true?

pan69• 17 years ago

They are fancy looking PC's. What'd you mean "that's not true"?

bumblebird4• 17 years ago

The % of people who use macs because they're "fancy looking" is pretty small. Most use them for a variety of other reasons - build quality, unixy, os+hardware from single vendor=less issues etc As well as all the cool gadgety stuff multitouch/mag power connector, mag lids etc

Tichy9• 17 years ago

Yeah, they are still just PCs - maybe pretty good PCs (if you like the style), but still just PCs. Sorry.

parenthesis• 17 years ago

To an extent, making `fancy looking PCs' was Apple's initial strategy upon the return of Jobs, to try to obscure the creaky old OS 8 / OS 9 which they were stuck with until the very time-consuming task of turning the Next OS into a version of OS X ready for the big time was complete. Quickly make a bold, attention-grabbing statement with the iMac casing, and milk that as long as possible until the real big attraction (OS X) is ready.

sleepingbot• 17 years ago

NeXT could have ended in the perfect Linux distro, open sourced, leading the Linux kernel development, making the distros environment even richer (Mac Linux for mac users, Ubuntu-Debian & similars for those who don't buy Apple hardware, Chrome OS for netbookers; and minoritary distros for the ones who tweak their own flavor.)

The world would be a better place.

The hardware? Some has been good. Some really advanced to their time. Some G4Cube-ish.

I have to admit the guy is brilliant.

wtallis• 17 years ago

NeXTSTEP wasn't based off the Linux kernel, and I think even if it had been GPL'd, it probably wouldn't have ended up that the Linux port was the preferred way to run it. Consider that OPENSTEP/Mach was contemporaneous with Red Hat Linux 4 and kernel 2.0. Everybody in the market for a desktop Linux distribution at the time would have jumped ship. If anything, the Mach 2.5 microkernel would have been stripped out in favor of a pure FreeBSD system, which would probably have resulted in Linux having the same also-ran status that the BSDs have now.

protomyth• 17 years ago

One of the biggest problems with NEXTSTEP that was addressed in the transition to OS X was the replacement of Display Postscript. The license and practice around that was horrible. I don't think the money was there to do that work without going to Apple.

notaddicted• 17 years ago

Apple is a data point in one of the eternal HN debates: Ideas vs. Execution.

The functional design of the iPhone was a surprise to no one, everyone wanted it, Apple delivered.

There are many operating system, but OSX is still an asset to Apple.

It may be the case that Apple has great ideas, but they certainly have great execution.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

Apple not only has great technical execution, they have great design execution. There are many industries with lots of excellent companies capable of this combination (automobiles, musical instruments, film, firearms, fashion) but in software this combination is rare as hen's teeth. Thus Apple's dominance in certain markets and customer devotion.

dnsworks• 17 years ago

Maybe we should be asking, "What if Jobs didn't beg Bill on huge screen television for $100m".

yardie2• 17 years ago

To a company that still had $4 billion in cash reserves it's the equivalent of one wallstreet banker asking another for hotdog money

What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

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