RoR: Forum

I sanctioned the essay, of course. That said, several minor points need to be adjusted.

Jobs did not build the Apple I. Wozniak did. Jobs had minimal technical skills. Woz worked at HP. Jobs was the visionary, the salesman. This came up in another topic: Ayn Rand glorified inventors, but seemed not to perceive salesmen. You can have the greatest gizmo in the world, but without sales, you are the only one to own it. And that's fine for the inventor. His work is his motive. Market success is something else, though.   Jobs marketed the Apple I and Apple II.

No Objecttivist is going to be thrilled at Jobs' visionary trip to India, his fruitarian diet, or other whacky aspects of his early life. The story of the "Lisa" - named for the child he abandoned - reveals the inner weaknesses in the adopted child that Jobs was. The story, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple : A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future by John Sculley tells of Jobs in his 30s, still acting like a spoiled child, literally attempting to win arguments by crying. After leaving Apple, Jobs' adventure with fellow maverick H. Ross Perot was unsuccessful, as it had to be by the very nature of the two men. Did Jobs grow up? He did. Did he get his head straight? He did. Was he ultimately the man he was meant to be? He was.

As for the zoning laws, Ed Hudgins is 100% correct: no city official closed down their garage shop. But that was the nature of Silicon Valley, going back to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard selling their audiotron tube to Disney. It was the "Fairchildren" leaving Watson and going off on their own. By the time the Apple II was head-to-head with Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Compaq and Radio Shack, builders were erecting rows of little "garages" for companies to start up in. Today, we see them all over as the self-storage sheds. Agreed that the lack of zoning laws on that particular point in that place allowed that mode of entrepreneurship.

Did Wall Street have anything to do with this? Not much. They were invested with IBM and the Seven Dwarves. Apple struggled for years because corporations lined up for Microsoft and the  IBM compatibles. An entrepreneur will pour all of her resources into her dream, but a manager watches his backside: "You can't get fired for recommending IBM." And the Macintosh remained a distant second.   Even more to the point, Apple and the other Silicon Valley pirates went to venture capitalists, private investors. They did not go to bankers and Wall Street because bankers and Wall Street were not interested in them ... until after they were successful. Then the lines of credit and the IPOs came along...

It is appropriate that the stock brokers and protestors live the same "lost world" of 19th century Marxism and monopoly capitalism. They are alike dinosaurs whose eggs have been eaten by a new life form, a funny furry little rodent hardly worth noting: the Mac, the iPod .... Those efforts, not just Apple, but the entire computer industry as we know it now, was created and fed, and nutured by small shops. The computers are nothing without software. Even Microsoft's success hinged on hundreds of independent developers, truly "Mom and Pop shops" in unknown little towns banging out code. What's a Droid or an iPhone without apps? Apps don't create themselves. (Well, when they do, we call them viruses and blame them on the Chinese.) And another dinosaur, the Obamasaurus Rex, promises "shovel-ready jobs." Dude, I have a keyboard, not a shovel.

Ed Hudgins is right: the protestors do not understand capitalism. Instead of attacking Wall Street, they should seek out the thousands of code hackers creating apps and demand that they disgorge the profits from Angry Birds, instant NBA scores, and searchable restaurant guides.

Be all that as it may, for me, there is another story entirely: Steve Jobs lived for years with a cancer that kills in weeks. I would like to know how he did that. What did his money buy that we don't know about?

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 10/07, 7:53am)

Post 1

Sunday, October 9, 2011 - 7:24am

Well said.

There is no doubt that Jobs was a marketing visionary.

But there have been totally ludicrous claims made in the press at his passing.

Inventor of the mouse?

Hardly. Who comes up with this nonsense? That came out of XEROX PARC (and even earlier work at research universities) long before he might have made legal moves to make a patent claim via our totally out of all control technology patent system(which is basically a playground for lawyers and legal gyrations, a wasteland.)

As far as microcomputer technology, the home PC revolution was a victory of vision, not technology. DEC's LSI-11 micros and RT-11 was fully mature and light years beyond the hobby stuff long before some folks went home from their day jobs and 'me, too'd' a cartoon imitiation of the good stuff. The technologically smart folks at DEC just could not beleive-- did not have the vision -- that micros would do to minis what minis were then doing to mainframes. DEC was settling in on what turned out to be 15 minutes of advantage focusing on their minis, and micros -- of which DEC had a mature beach-head established with its LSI-11 hardware-- regarded it as a tiny laboratory specialty niche. By the time they realized their mistake, instead of leading the revolution they came in late and had to 'me, too' a sad offering (whatever that aborted 'rainbow' thing was.)

The brilliance of Apple and MS and AMiga and so on and their early vision is balanced by the story of DEC totally blowing it up there in Maynard.

That was the real innovation of the 'home PC' folks. Anyone who has seen the internals of CP/M and DOS and is familiar with RT-11 recognizes them as crude copies of RT-11, right down to the IVT.

Apple's core(sorry)innovation was the marketing campaigh that Jobs came up with: the 'creation' of an imaginary community of cool, entry to which could only be gained by ... purchasing something with an Apple logo. Of course, the imaginary itch is never adequately scratched because that imagined community does not actually exist, and the only cure is to keep scratching because the failure must be ours; it can't be a defect of that cool non-existing community of cool. Brilliant.

Apple's early courting of education including generous subsidy, was also very forward thinking.

But let's not make any mistake; the original impetus for Apple and all that came afterward was the success of their early innovation and actually performing home PC. Their early success bootstrapped all that followed.

Around every partnership with a Wozniak there is always a Jobs hovering and taking 99% of the credit, skilled mostly in the art of self-promotion. He looked the part and played it for all it was worth.

Inventor of the mouse.

Seriously?

Post 2

Sunday, October 9, 2011 - 8:34am

There is no doubt that Jobs was a marketing visionary.

But there have been totally ludicrous claims made in the press at his passing.

Inventor of the mouse?

Hardly. Who comes up with this nonsense? That came out of XEROX PARC (and even earlier work at research universities) long before he might have made legal moves to make a patent claim via our totally out of all control technology patent system(which is basically a playground for lawyers and legal gyrations, a wasteland.)

Similar remarks could be made about the graphical user interface. There is more about the history of the mouse here.

Post 3

Sunday, October 9, 2011 - 11:29am

I have an iPod I've had for years that lives in my car's glove box and hooks into my car stereo. I have an iPhone and I remain impressed with the ease of use and flawless functioning. I have iTunes and have never been unhappy with that. The only Apple computer I've owned was a laptop many years ago - just after they came out - and I was happy with it, but I went back to Windows on Intel because that is what I like to program on. I didn't like Macintosh for software development.
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I think that Jobs greatness was in a special kind of leadership at Apple. He recognized the value of what he saw at Xerox Parc and he envisioned putting that together as a product. Then, and to me, this was the key; he built a state of the art product, as envisioned, at very high levels of quality. That is very tough to do. Usually the first breakthrough of a technology gets cobbled together as a product that has a lot of rough edges and short-comings, but they are forgiven because it is the first of its kind. And it is just the geeks and early-adopters that buy. But no forgiveness was needed with Apple products. With them the quality was extremely high. Then he did his marketing thing.

He seemed to have a flair for knowing how to hit that horizon of a product that was from enough into the future to be exciting, was a product that matched where technology was going so that it started a lasting trend instead of the dead-end of a hula hoop, but it was not so far out in the future that it couldn't be done right. That adds up to genius.

Another component of his success came from creating an almost cult-like following. It brought the very best out of his employees - they would have followed him over a cliff, and it attracted very sharp people to work there, and then, in the market place it let him charge higher prices - which is probably what made it possible to marry high quality (expensive to produce), to high price (hard to sell), and yet sell to a much larger market segment than would normally be expected for expensive, early-adopter, niche products.

When people buy an apple product they are always very, very pleased with the 'coolness' - not just the "I am cool because I have an Apple product" but how much more usable and high quality the product is. In software, having written software for many years, I can quickly sense aspects of the personality of the author. Sometimes it is an engineering person and I can see how solid the work is - a master of crafting working software with no weak points - but not necessarily an artist and sometimes it feels clunky and awkward to use. It won't break, but it isn't fun to use. Sometimes it is an artist behind the software. It is elegant in appearance and the user interface flows in a natural way. But sometimes the artists lack engineering skills and that software breaks all the time. Jobs was hands on and insisted, and got, the very highest levels of engineering and artistry that seemed to be perfectly mated.

Those things all flow together. Envisioning something that is ahead of competition, demanding the highest quality, making the product 'cool' to use, getting really good employees that are loyal to the nth degree, marketing the products so that they can be sold at top dollar and have a reputation that never falters and creates a cult like following. Picking real winning ideas from the point of return-on-investment so that the next years product line would grow the company to still new levels. The iPod sells music and at a time when music was almost dead due to piracy. And Apple's iPhone sells apps for a few dollars, and take a cut from the phone companies. All of this could only happen if someone with extraordinary leadership skills and foresight is driving the process and overseeing it so that it never makes a serious misstep. That is an a huge accomplishment. My hat is off to the guy. I think he was a giant.

Post 4

Sunday, October 9, 2011 - 12:06pm