There are all these stories about Hertzfeld, Atkinson and others from the early Mac days. I have never heard similar stuff about iPhone development. Who are the heroes of iOS?
You have him to thank for the iPhone in whole. He ran the team that developed iOS and defined the modern smartphone interface. Literally one of the largest software leadership contributions in history.
I really don't mean for that to sound in any way snarky or whatever. I'm also not trying to diminish the role Jobs played as a visionary, driving the company to create the right product. Not a Jobs cultist, and I'm also not wishing to denigrate him. It's just that, in light of the point being made, I think it really illustrates that point so well that there are only two names that I feel are championed as the heroes of the iPhone & iOS—Jobs and Ive. Sure, there are other execs who show up in keynotes/events, and they get some praise for their roles/departments ... and I think that really drives the point home. People doing the work aren't highlighted and recognized. It's the execs who get the praise, accolades, awards, etc. Maybe there are individual contributor names on patents or something, but nobody really seems to know who they are.
You're excluding his co-founding of Danger and the development of the Sidekick, which was way ahead of its time and did a lot more than the original iPhone could do - just without a touchscreen.
To describe his contributions to mobile as a pale shadow of what Steve Jobs was doing is unfair.
I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was there. Yes he's amazing.
But people like Avie Tevanian, Tim Cook, Bertrand Serlet, Bob Mansfield, Johnny Ive, Dan Riccio etc. all played critical roles in turning Apple around.
iPhone simply isn't a success without all of the above functioning at a high level.
I think it’s Steve Jobs that was a once in a lifetime aberration. Under his leadership Apple basically created three industries: mass-market personal computing, digital music, and smartphones.
This was a great window back in time. It really conveys how what apple accomplished was the product of many hard working, passionate people self-organizing as needed to make things happen. It's sad that so much of the popular history of apple seems to focus on steve jobs as this mythical singular figure who is clearly given more credit than he is owed at the expense of real stories like this, which are much more compelling.
I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.
We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.
Not necessarily this one instance, but many people that I've talked to tend to credit Jobs with many technical achievements, if not everything Apple ever did.
Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas... I love how you leave out Woz, and the Team of people that made the iPod/iPhone/iPad
Edison is renowned for taking credit for other peoples work, notably some of the work of Nikola Tesla who you also leave off your list and was one of the rare singular geniuses on the level of a Einstein
Elon Musk has a vision of his idealized world and the money to hire people that will attempt to make it happen
None of the people you list (aside from Einstein) are singular genius working on their own creating the ideas and products and I think we do a disservice to everyone when we say "Jobs invented the iPhone".
That is not to say their contributions to the projects are not important but I do believe there is some amount of Hero Worship and over inflation of their value/importance and an massive under appreciation for the 100's or 1000's of other people that actually make these ideas or products a reality
Maybe you can point to ANY other industry in the world, any other company, where all the people who worked on a project get praised, or even mentioned. Maybe some newspaper article, where anyone besides the CEO, or if you are lucky the top management team are described.
In fact, just show me any writing anywhere, doesn't even have to be a newspaper, where everyone else is mentioned?
Why, because it is ridiculous and stupid to ask that.
Steve Jobs was the one pushing the iPhone, he was the one that didn't back down when getting the usual shit from the carriers, like everybody did before him. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, they all bowed down before the carriers, changed stuff on their phones, had annoying splash screens and apps. That was Steve Jobs, not engineer 118b.
I think it's because so many of Apple's customers idolized him. He was seen as a hero that could do no wrong, and all the poor decisions that Apple made were somehow someone else's fault. Even when I saw people complaining that Apple was making things harder for developers, Steve's name was not mentioned.
Jobs practically created the iphone with his bare hands. The biggest differentiator between Apple and other companies has been the the development process. No large company, and few small companies, ever has had such a focused process that consciously fights against the interjection of bureaucracy.
Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio also had incredibly talented people working for them — many of the same incredibly talented people who worked for Jobs — but they didn't manage to take the company anywhere but down.
And I don't how how many people at Apple you know, but all the ones I've heard from are just as superlative about Steve's contribution to the company. I haven't yet heard a one take umbrage at the recognition he gets (this was true even before he died, so it's not simply "don't speak ill of the dead").
I'm not trying to downplay the contributions of everyone else — certainly, Steve could never have done it without them — but I don't think you're giving him the credit that his accomplishments deserve, simply because he didn't have the precise role in the process that you personally respect.
He and Scott Forstall were also the ones who fought for side loading in the initial iPhone. And was also aware of the business consequences, App Store was there to help selling more iPhone. It is now a rent seeking machine with absolute power over many trenches of our society and economy.
I also think people often mistaken some of those design choices as anti user freedom. Where the results of those decision might seems that way, the starting point were different. Things like integrated hardware design.
Steve was an empathic and also a hash person. People often seems to read everything as if he was an asshole and very little about his empathic side of stories.
I feel as though you're assuming facts not in evidence, here.
Can you explain a little bit more what legacy you feel Steve Wozniak has left at Apple that persists to this day, along with why it has been important to the company's success?
My analysis of Apple's latter day success:
- Steve Jobs, demanding a high standard of quality and providing vision for ongoing products and strategy. Selecting and grooming smart people for crucial leadership roles. Requiring accountability and virtuous integration between product components and even different products.
- Tim Cook, optimizing industrial and business processes, ensuring high margins, protecting profits and structuring clever, unmatched deals for manufacturing and supply sourcing
- Jonathan Ive, designing the physical incarnations of Apple that create strong connections to the brand for customers
So is your position that software engineering has had an equally critical role to what's described above, and the engineering leadership has been Woz-esque? While Apple does make world-class software, I'm not sure I agree about the Woz bit, but I'm open to a persuasive argument.
edit: Especially when you consider how much of Apple's software engineering assets and talent came from NeXT.
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