Why do we ever only read stories about Ive, and not nearly as often about people who made software design decisions, who work on the OS or security, or who made strategic decisions such as Apple's walled garden?
The only technocrat who triumphed seems to be Ive.
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.
With respect to Ive, I think there's something to be said of being in the right place at the right time.
Steve Jobs was the rare executive who truly valued design. He did not nickel and dime on design even when it added cost. Most designers at other companies would likely get shot down any time they presented a novel idea that might be a little harder or expensive to manufacture.
I don't think you can achieve greatness in a vacuum, and I tend to think that Ive was very fortunate to be working for Apple under Jobs. Had he been at any other company, I don't think any of us would have even heard of him.
Steve Jobs, without any doubt. Apple's renaissance wasn't so much about technology as about an entrepreneur at the top ( instead of a manager) who could turn the ship around.
A solid UNIX operating system with a well-designed UI certainly helped in terms of technology. As did Objective-C. Technologically, Apple's achievements would've been difficult to realise with their classic Mac OS (which Apple knew quite well as they had been shopping around for a new operating system technology for quite some time at that point).
NeXTSTEP and Objective-C probably hit a sweet spot there, albeit one that would only come to fruition years later. I doubt Apple's current success would've been possible (in the way it turned out to be at least) with BeOS (another serious contender at the time) or Linux.
I was being a bit facetious in listing just Ive, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that his industrial design department has been that important to Apple's success. Most notably, the iPod is almost certainly the product that gave Apple the financial stability to develop OS X into what it is today, and to undertake the Intel transition that enabled them to take over the high-end computer market. If the iPod had been only slightly better than the other mp3 players of the time, Apple probably wouldn't have been able to make much profit off it or the iTunes Media Store.
It's bizarre to me that people have this perception when Jony Ive is practically a household name in the US; not to mention that Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall all have been given props by Steve in his keynotes. I could rattle off more of Apple's senior leadership than any other tech company, so I really don't understand why people claim that Steve Jobs took all the glory.
"But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was holistic thinking. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products."
I still have no clue about how he managed to do it. For example, I think that Cocoa and Next technologies are very elegant and are at the foundation of Apple current success. Yet how can you lead the developments of those technologies if you don't understand them. Why it didn't go the same way, of let say, Symbian.
I'm not an expert in CS (not even close), but to me it looks like there is very little crust on Apple technologies. And I don't think that this is the case for all the other mayor tech companies, where I observe a significative amount of technical debt. One explanation might be that there was great technical people on board and in charge. But this is the norm for all multinationals. How he managed to design so few products that are "bad apples" (pun intended).
This is a really core issue for me. I'm a business guy by education (two Masters of Management) who always has been oriented to software development (I always liked it and the basis of C always have been intuitive). When the App Store launched I started to work with a CS Engineer to develop an app. While the arrangement was workable, I felt I was missing so much without the proper technical knowledge. How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field. Consequently, having the chance, I took the next two years of my life learning sw development, graphic/UI, design, and a bit of web development. Financially and mentally it was a very costly decision that kept me on the verge of burning out and, yet, I don't understand if it was the right choice.
I would love to hear the opinion of the community.
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.
Dennis Ritchie eventually became the head of Lucent Technologies’ Software System Research Department before retiring in 2007; he never led a multi billion-dollar corporation, sought the public eye, or had his every utterance scrutinized and re-scrutinized. Ritchie was by all accounts a quiet, modest man with a strong work ethic and dry sense of humor. But the legacy of his work played a key role in spawning the technological revolution of the last forty years — including technology on which Apple went on to build its fortune.
Conversely, Steve Jobs was never an engineer. Instead, his legacy lies in democratizing technology, bringing it out of the realm of engineers and programmers and into people’s classrooms, living rooms, pockets, and lives. Jobs literally created technology for the rest of us.
Who wins? We all do. And now, it’s too late to personally thank either of them
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.
And I didn't say that the doer always deserves the credit. As an example, who deserves more credit for the success of Apple, Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? Wozniak created the Apple I and most of the Apple II. But clearly Jobs' ideas built the current company.
However these cases are the exception, not the rule. As a rule ideas are cheap, implementations are hard. And success has more to do with iterating on the implementation than the starting ideas.
By promoting Ive, didn't Jobs actually affect a fairly large change in design talent? According to wikipedia:
"He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad"
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.
Larry Ellison was prescient when he said that Jony Ive would run amok without an editor in Steve Jobs, in an interview after Jobs' death (Ellison was good friends with Jobs). Perhaps the utter lack of design innovation and frankly, new consumer products led Jony Ive to obsess over the ring campus, going to ridiculous lengths to make things just so. All that money and creative energy could have been put into groundbreaking product, but with Steve Jobs gone, I doubt there was anyone else who could do what he did.
It was both. Apple would never have succeeded without great engineers. I think he's downplaying the role that technology plays here to emphasise his point. What Apple/Steve did really well was to understand their market really well and channel technical efforts towards that and carefully curate the results. Another aspect that's often not noticed is how costs were managed on the other side. For instance to this day Apple doesn't support blue ray because it would deliver limited value but add to their bottom line. Similarly how they aggressively eliminated optical disks when they got the chance.
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?
The only technocrat who triumphed seems to be Ive.
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