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.
Steve was great because he hired great people. For that he deserves a lot of credit. He also (for better or worse) had a very keen idea of what was workable or reasonable in terms of UX - essentially he had taste.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
To be fair though, without Steve, the engineers would have never thought of creating Apple and a business. It is a team effort, but let's not undermine the importance of a great leader.
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.
I’ll make that argument: Steve Jobs doesn't deserve 100% of the credit for Apple's success.
I think that’s trivially true. AFAIK, it wasn’t him alone who put 100+ million iPhones in boxes every year, and without that, Apple’s success would have been smaller. He also didn’t do hardware design without help, and I’m fairly sure he didn’t write much of Apple’s software, etc. etc.
Even if you think all others involved were replaceable, many of them still contributed.
The thing is, he didn't do all that. At least not by himself.
A lot of talented people built every single one of those things, and without them, Steve Jobs wouldn't exist.
As stated before, gathering those talents and driving them to make these things does take a lot of effort and he did that very well.
Behind that guy in the cover of the magazines there are tons of people that actually made those amazing things. Many gave ideas that in the end made that product a whole.
And finally, without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot. Or not. The thing is, you can't know what would've happened without him. So don't say that as a fact, it's at best a supposition.
As one of those former engineers at Apple, I can say definitively that Steve deserves it. Without him, we'd never have had the canvas on which to paint.
Steve Jobs never took sole credit for inventing anything or changing the world. He always heaped substantial credit to the smart people that worked under him. It's the media and many people that inflate the importance of individual people and attribute everything to them. How many times do they use a star player's name rather than referring to a team by their name? Think "Michael Jordan battles Larry Bird tonight on ESPN".
It's hard to dispute that Apple as a whole has changed the world in profound ways, whether you like them or not. Steve Jobs' greatest attribute was assembling great talent and motivating them into creating great things. Perhaps this comedian doesn't like the way that he pushed people into doing what they felt was impossible.
Perhaps Apple would have changed the world without him, but surely it would have been very different without him. Even though he can't be given full credit by any means, he deserves a lot of it for motivating people and pushing them to their creative limits. Steve Wozniak has been very critical of Steve over the years but also recognized that his contribution was essential to getting products into the hands of people. When you read that Steve Jobs or Scott Forstall was the "creator of the iPhone" I suspect all of them would laugh and vigorously correct you. And they would be absolutely right to do so.
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.
Everyone in any field has had help or inspiration from others. I'm just not a fan fo Malcom calling this tweaking, its is demeaning to everyone who's ever done anything. If Steve Jobs just "tweaked" things and wasn't and inventor than what does that say about everyone else in the world?
Its easy to take shots at someone after the fact, the reality is that maybe he wasn't everything people thought he was. He might not have been a sweetheart to work with, in fact he may have been a jerk. But, lets not kid ourselves into believing he didn't do that much and was just some tweaker at Apple, I call BS. Apple was basically dead when he returned, dead. It must have been a little more than tweaking to make it the most successful company in the world.
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.
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.
I agree, nobody has orchestrated the development of products people want this decade more than Steve. He deserves the praise as well as all those working for Apple.
Steve (Jobs, not Blank) was an unparalleled visionary. I give him credit for the Apple II [1], the Mac, Objective C, NeXTOS/OSX/MacOS, and the whole i-series from his second stint at Apple (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad). To call him an overachiever would be quite the understatement. He is truly in a class by himself. I can't offhand think of anyone else in his league. (Elon Muck comes closest, but I'd rate him a very distant second.)
---
[1] Yes, I know Woz actually designed and built it, but Burrell Smith designed the original Mac, and neither of those things would have been possible without Jobs.
Steve gave massive credit to the talent and sweat of Apple's engineers and designers in nearly every keynote. He was as humble as you could expect of a CEO.
Do you think that Steve Jobs was the entirety of Apple's QA and decision-making process? Far too much good stuff has come out of Apple in the past decade for Steve to get sole credit. While Jobs obviously had the power to veto any bad idea, he didn't have the time to veto every bad idea, or to suggest every good idea. He can only micro-manage some of the things some of the time.
He built and trained a system that, even with Steve still running it, is obviously capable of making good decisions without him. He may have been the primary motivator for the development of the iPad and iPhone, but he didn't create OpenCL, libdispatch, CoreAnimation, and Automatic Reference Counting. He didn't invent the unibody construction process or Gorilla Glass or LightPeak or multi-touch, and he's obviously not the only person at Apple who can recognize their value and figure out how to use them to make a better product. If that were the case, he would have been a huge bottleneck and Apple would never be able to ship more than one product a year.
You're confusing leading by example with doing it all yourself.
Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact, Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia, litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.
Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]
Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications. I'll admit that directing such efforts is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and ignored while the modifier is celebrated with maudlin elegies.
EDIT: The media's treatment of his death, President Obama's statement that he was a great "inventor", etc. was not his fault. But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia. Ignoring Dennis and John while celebrating Steve is like fawning over the interior decorator with praise about the warmth of a house while ignoring the carpenter and contractor.
Perhaps I should add that I am being critical of Steve because of an abundance of articles that did not focus on what he actually contributed, or criticized only his behavior towards others. Steve did seem to be able to hire, attract, or motivate as many talented engineers as he did drive away. This is a very hard thing for a CEO to do, and he deserves a large amount of credit for doing this. The talent that he helped attract and the products they create are responsible for Apple's stock price rise and continued profitability since his death.
This is a big oversimplification. Some people got screwed therefore he was always screwing everyone over. His career spans many years and quite a few people managed great contributions working with him in that time and got very well compensated and congratulated for that.
Steve Jobs did give a lot of credit to the people who worked under him, just to pick out a couple of notable examples he frequently heaped praise on Avie Tevanian and also the guy who actually made the initial speculative potential merger call to Apple. And in doing so he specifically called out their accomplishments as being savvy and decisive and not just boring implementation stuff.
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.
reply