That isn't really true. Steve Jobs was no nonsense, but was most often merely direct rather than rude.
One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS was very different from the modern Apple where contributors joust for top status without much if any existential threat.
I don't admire Steve Jobs's personality, but I find myself talking about him all the time, for two reasons:
1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles.
2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
I'm accepting your first part for the sake of argument so we can focus on the second part:
"there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief,"
I believe your perspective is in error when you get to the part about "without any fact at all to backup this belief". I believe that Steve Jobs was certainly charismatic, and probably one of the great people at getting his team to believe in a mission-- but I don't think this is "reality distortion", nor do I believe this was "without any fact at all to backup this belief".
In fact, I believe the reason he was so good was because he did have facts-- facts that the mainstream may not have been aware of-- but that were true. The thing is, many people still dispute these facts. (Eg: "The iPad is just a big iPod touch" disputes the killer app of the iPad, but the reality of iPad sales shows that they were wrong.)
Lets take some key products where Jobs got his team to believe in a mission to make something that was significantly different:
The Macintosh, NeXTSTEP & the iPhone.
For the Macintosh:
The facts: Most computers were difficult to use. Apple had strong experience with this for the apple // which was command line based. The Mac team went to Xerox and saw some of the key technology working and saw how it was more efficient (technology that Apple had a license to with the deal). Another Fact: The Apple // was a very integrated computer for its time, but a competing company (I forget the name at the time) had gone one step further and integrated the monitor with the computer. Thus the mission of the Macintosh: An integrated computer with the footprint of a phonebook that was sold like an appliance and that anyone could use because of its GUI, was not a distortion of reality, nor did it lack "any fact at all" to back up the mission. All the key elements existed elsewhere, though of course the schedule was completely unrealistic (but back then the fact that software was always late was not as widely accepted as it is now.)
NeXTSTEP:
The facts: Unix is powerful, multi-tasking is powerful. Object Oriented Software allows for component re-use. The mission: Build a unix workstation at reasonable cost that allows for rapid application development using object oriented software. True, NeXTSTEP was the first OO operating system (like the Mac was the first real GUI) and so there was some leap of faith to think they could do it or that it could be successful, but this is not based on a distortion of reality. Pre-emptive multitasking is really useful, and OO can allow for code re-use, and in the NeXT environment (and now OS X and iOS it really is a force multiplier for developers.) I don't see how he distorted reality or the facts there-- except, again, he set a deadline for delivery based on the fact that they were a startup. The deadline was unrealistic, because software takes too long and they missed it.
The iPhone:
The facts: The phone market was a mess. People hated their phones. (I did some research in this area, and found the churn rate was something like %83 and the dissatisfaction with ones phone was something like %70, though I may have those numbers reversed.) The software market for phones was locked down by carriers. The interfaces were terrible- often just a numeric keypad and if you had a full qwerty keyboard it made the phone unwieldy. A touch interface would be better, obviously ,right? Well, Apple bought Fingerworks. They knew touch interfaces could work because Fingerworks invented them. People hating their phones, the software being locked down by carriers, bad interfaces and limited usability due to physical keyboards are all things that you can't really dispute. There was a leap of faith in believing a completely touch based phone would work, and they spent many years working on it (and the iPad project which was started earlier). And again the timing for when they thought they could ship it was unrealistic and they had to bring in engineers from the OS X side of things to make their date. Did Jobs distort reality to get the team to work on the iPhone? I don't see why we should believe that. Did he get them to work on a mission without "any facts at all" to backup the belief that it could work? I don't think so-- that the phone industry was broken was obvious to a lot of people. I myself worked on a completely voice driven phone project in the late 1990s, but stopped due to being unable to get sufficient horsepower in a battery powered device to do the voice recognition.
In all three cases the market need was pretty clear. The technology precedents were visible. Both of these are facts that back up the belief in the mission. Neither of these rely on a distortion of reality.
All projects for new products require some faith. But getting people to believe something is possible, even when it hasn't been done before, doesn't mean necessarily doing it without any fact,s and in these cases, the facts to support the project were there.
If his crime is making people believe that the software won't take as long as it actually does, I can't fault him, and to be honest, he seems to be no worse in that regard than any manager I've ever had. (many of whom were deliberate about it.)
At Microsoft, for instance, when I worked there it was common practice to name the next release of windows something like "Windows 93" so that the employees all knew it had to come out in 1993, even though management knew it wouldn't be ready til 1997. Didn't want them to slack off thinking they had 4 years to get it done!
Ultimately, Steve Jobs had an insight into what computers could be, how technology could work, that was not only powerful but that Apple worked to execute throughout the entire stack of its product. From industrial design to operating system to software, his vision infused Apple's products in a way that very few other computer manufacturers have seen. Even now, as "well-designed products" are becoming a popular thing – due, in no small part, to Apple's influence – it is difficult to find products that are as thoroughly, nit-pickingly well-thought-out as Apple's stuff.
Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.
Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.
Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.
Steve Jobs having nothing to do with the original Macintosh doesn't imply that Steve Jobs' aesthetic sense didn't result in Apple's resurgence.
It might imply that Jobs is not a nice guy but I think even a lot of Apple fans are OK with Jobs being a not-nice-guy-who-gives-them the coolest stuff.
I am personally distributed by the cult-like-climate that Apple is described as having but I am also appreciate that Apple is seen as where the best UIs appear.
I think having single persons aesthetic control is very important to and we should think about why.
My suspicion is that one wouldn't necessarily have to have genius to do this, just a willingness not to accept the usual croft that infects just any large engineering project. Any average user off the street can walk and say "I don't want to do that in five steps, I want to do it in one". The only genius it take here is a willingness to keep attitude even though a team of twenty spent a year deciding that five steps made sense (and their terrible decision happen because the logic of engineering process crept slowly and insidiously into their aesthetic, their idea of what is "OK").
Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point.
And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they, more than anything, demonstrate the height of Steve's capability of creating a company and product. Anybody who used Sun's Desktop OS and associated applications 5 years later saw how far ahead of the market NeXT was. I thought it was a far superior product to the Macintosh, which, by 1993/1994, was starting to get long in the tooth, and by 1996/1997 had fallen behind Windows in platform power/flexibility, causing me (never particularly religious about the platform I worked on - best tool for the job and all) to leave the Mac behind and switch to Windows (Followed by a switch back in 2003 when OS X took the lead again)
Does anyone honestly think Apple would exist today (and certainly not in it's current dominance) were it not for this single individual?
And, is it really a coincidence that Pixar rose to the heights it did with Steve at the helm?
Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. Designers/Architects are somewhat more rare, but they can be identified, recruited, and hired.
But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Certainly doesn't mean we have to like them as people though.
Sorry, let me rephrase: I don't think Steve Jobs was like that at all.
But the copycats that don't believe in iterative development or in user research love to pretend they got all figured out before it's out for development.
As we can clearly see you have no idea how Jobs worked. He was extremely passionate about his beliefs, but as many have said, again and again, he would be completely opposed to an idea one day and the next he'd be telling you about how that was the best thing ever. He knew when it was time to re-evaluate his opinions.
He said Apple would never make a phone. They did. He said "never" many times, and many times Apple went and did exactly that.
Learn your history.
Yes, pre-NeXT Steve Jobs wasn't as good at directing products, but he did create the Macintosh. Post-NeXT (and Pixar) he had a much better sense of how to build teams and create products, those years were not squandered.
Dismissing someone because of failures is ridiculous. Bill Gates shipped Windows 1.0, an abortion of a product, and Windows 2.0, which was nearly as useless. It was only with Windows 3.0 they finally got traction and that went on to become the dominant operating system in the world.
Steve Jobs wasn’t the innovator he was the guy trying to keep everything for Apple from a business perspective which you said should be distinguished from the people doing the actual innovative work. Also it’s an understatement to say that Steve could be a bit dramatic more for effect than anything else.
It seems like people these days can’t even accurately describe what Steve Jobs was, he was a leader. He was a genius at managing people to work for him. Steve Wozniak was not, which was why Jobs could make Pixar, Next and of course Apple. Just because he didn’t have a hard skill of engineering, doesn’t mean he was useless. Rarely is anything impressive made by a single person, everything is almost always made by teams and generally large teams. Large teams especially can only function under a great leader and jobs was a great leader for a myriad of reasons which was why he achieved success at many multiples of magnitude compared to Steve Wozniak
I'm not questioning your judgement of Steve's personality. But it surprises me that person like Steve can be so successful. Moreover, how did he recruit and manage so many world class developers and designers? Not once. But thrice - Apple, NeXT and Pixar. What made Steve so successful when everyone who has worked with him thinks he was a jerk!
I read his stories at - http://folklore.org/ And he looks inspirational as well as jerk. But most of these stories are around creation of Mac. By that time, Apple was quite successful. I'm genuinely curios about how did he manage to recruit first 10 employees if he had terrible inter-personal skills.
Wrong. Steve Jobs knew a lot about tech. Did a lot of IC design and did a lot of product design overall in the early days. Sure, he didn't know as much as Woz but still brought a lot to the table. He wasn't just a "CMO" who gave some pointers on the UI and that was it.
Knocking The Steve may be fashionable, but that's ignoring the huge amount of hardware and software engineering work over the decades that he oversaw at Apple. It might not have rocked the world like inventing C or UNIX but it's not insignificant.
You would think, but 9/10 people making comments about Steve Jobs on the internet describe him as only a savvy marketeer and business man. Steve didn't invent anything, doesn't know how to program bla bla, is how it goes. While Steve Jobs was an asshole in many ways this is a gross injustice to his legacy. He clearly had a lot of input and influence on Apple products and was important in making them good.
But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of products to take this view.
One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS was very different from the modern Apple where contributors joust for top status without much if any existential threat.
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