All that is true, and Ford was STILL a man of immense importance. Ergo, a great man.
That’s not what I said. I framed Jobs’ and Apple’s particular innovations that way. The general technology would have existed and developed without them.
I don’t think you can call any technological advance revolutionary if we would have been at more-or-less the same place within a generation anyway.
Can’t the same be said for pretty much any innovation?
(bolding mine)
Well, we are here in the world that Jobs influenced. Would Consumer Tech be in the same spot within a generation? Speculative at best. What we do know is that the Consumer Tech that Jobs led the creation of did result in big cultural change.
Would some other person/company have focused on the little rotate-and-click iPod interface or the intuitive fingertip-driven interface of iPhones? Perhaps eventually, but the intuitive functionality of those innovations blew folks away at the time and drove the huge increase in adoption vs. the other examples available at the time.
Fundamentally Jobs didn’t do anything particularly amazing in terms of technological innovation. What he did do was focus on the user experience, and tailored *existing * technologies such as the touchscreen or the digital music marketplace to give a better experience.
More importantly for Apple, his direction made Apple products cool and hip. I mean, back in 1998, who was buying iMacs because they were extraordinarily powerful computing devices? Nobody. The people who bought them did so because they were cute, came in multiple colors, and were integrated essentially into one object that the keyboard and mouse attached to. That’s it. There weren’t any super-duper iOS improvements for the iMacs, and the hardware wasn’t any great shakes either. But they were cool.
Apple kept that up with the iPod, then iPhone and iPads. Just look at those old Justin Long Mac ads- the verbal message was about relative ease of use between Macs and PCs, but the unspoken message was that Apple stuff was cool and hip, and the PC world was clunky junk that your dad used at work. True enough, but they don’t mention that the Macs were never cutting edge hardware-wise, and they still don’t mention that just about every improvement or advancement on an iPhone or iPad was pioneered a generation or more earlier on Android. I mean, being able to choose what keyboard app you want to use is a new thing on iOS 8 in 2014, but has been available on Android since at least 2010.
But none of that matters- the Apple user base has bought into the notion that Apple stuff is easier to use and works better, even if that’s only partially true, and also seems to put great stock in the coolness factor of the products.
Jobs gets great credit for engineering this “cool” factor and realizing what makes a product cool, and hiring the right marketing guys to push that correctly. He also gets credit for having a user-interface/experience knack and being able to put that into practice.
But as far as being some kind of technical genius? I don’t know… I always had the impression that Wozniak was the real propeller-head genius of the two of them, and that Jobs was more of a businessman and user-experience guy.
His vision, in terms of which features to focus on and which to edit out, so these products integrated into a human’s daily life so easily - is central to the discussion of Jobs “greatness.” If this is merely a happenstance next-step that some other person or company would’ve gotten to, fine. I would argue that this action led by him is what pivoted computers more directly into Consumer Tech, and it is unclear if, how or when this would happen otherwise.
To me, this is an effect caused by Apple’s products being so well designed to integrate with a person’s daily life.
I think Jobs rose above the level of businessman. To me a businessman is somebody who succeeds (or fails) within the existing system. People like Jobs or Gates or Ford or Rockefeller changed the system.
As for greatness, it depends on which definition you use. Jobs was great in the sense of having an impact. He was not great in the sense of being a role model.
His employees were not convinced of that.
You are not seriously pointing to “the little rotate-and-click” as a driver of cultural change.
That’s me, a joker. That’s not the only design aspect that differentiated the iPod vs other devices, but it was one of them, including iTunes and the user interface.
No different than Henry Ford simpling down car design and manufacturing relative to other car makers, showing how a car could be integrated into a huge population’s daily life, and transforming how we look at transportation. And distance. And the practicality of suburbs, etc.
Look at any other technology that comes into wide use. Once many thousands of people are using something routinely, streamlining of design always happens.
Great - so you argue that Consumer Tech functionality like iPods, iPhones and iPads would’ve emerged within a generation or so anyway, so Jobs was a minor jump ahead at best.
I disagree, unless another champion for a closed eco-system, user experience-first emerged. To me, his approach was part of enabling him to envision and Apple to deliver their Consumer Tech. An open system approach could follow the innovation started within a closed system.
Again, that is the point of this thread. You see him as an incrementalist at best; I and others see Jobs as a lead actor in the transition from computer tools to computer lifestyle.
They were all there already. Nothing Apple did was that groundbreaking though; we had MP3 players, and everyone was working on some kind of iTunes like marketplace. Apple combined the capacitive touchscreen with a smartphone (which existed in several forms already), to make the iPhone. People were already buried in their Blackberries and Palm Pilots long before the iPhone came around- Apple merely made it cool, and aimed it squarely at the everyday home user, not businesses, like RIM and Palm had.
I see it the other way around; Apple had been around for years, and what kick-started their renaissance was the iMac in 1998. It wasn’t all that awesome, performance-wise. But it was cool, and most importantly, it was cute and came in different colors. I recall there being a big deal about it coming in MORE colors than it did originally.
It was a marketing and product placement triumph, and for the most part, still is. Things like the iPad, iPod and iMac didn’t succeed because they were that awesome, but because they were cool, and ostensibly easier to use than the competition. They were highly marketed in a way that the competition never really has been- I remember the iconic iPod ads, but I can’t remember any competitor’s music player ads.
A bunch of smart moves to put themselves in place as a market leader, but nothing terribly groundbreaking. I’d tend to think that if the Apple phones were so special, they’d somehow dominate the smartphone market, which isn’t the case- the iPhones are slightly behind the Android phones in total market share.
It’s a matter of Apple customers having a lot of cultic feelings that influence their decisions and opinions about their products, and to a lesser extent, the fact that once you buy into one or the other of the ecosystems (iOS vs. Android/PC), you have barriers to exit that tend to lock one in to one or the other). But you never hear Apple people say “Well, I’m getting another iPhone because I already have a Mac, a iTunes account and an iPad”. It’s always some BS about how awesome the new Apple thing is, even when it’s a kind of a retread like the iPhone 6, which merely retrod a bunch of ground that Android phones had already walked long before.
So what? Ordinary British soldiers didn’t necessarily consider Churchill a great man, but he was.
A great man isn’t necessarily a good man. He can even be an evil man- Stalin and Mao were certainly both (not that Ford belongs in a similar category). Nothing in the Bible says a genius can’t be an asshole!
bump - yep, it sounds like you side with Peremensoe and others who see what Jobs did as incremental.
I get it, but feel it is short-sighted. Looking in hindsight and saying “yeah, it’s just a logical next step using what was available in slightly new ways” feels like it really undersells how big and different the impact was when the Apple devices came along.
I think that comparison is laughable. Remove Henry Ford’s innovations from the world and life is very, very different indeed.
Remove Job’s innovations from the world and we have a change of style and aesthetics but life continues in much the same vein as it does now.
You say potato, I say revolutionary human-computer interface. Whether it is iTunes, Tinder/Grindr, Uber, Apple Pay, Facebook paying $19Bn for What’s App to focus more on the mobile market, etc. - at this point in history, Steve Jobs is pointed to as a key player in transforming behaviors and businesses based on his vision for Consumer Tech.
You clearly see him as having a minor, marketing type impact. We’ll have to see how many more movies get made about him, and how he is discussed down the road as someone who envisioned a new approach to Consumer Tech and then delivered on it.
Oh, I’m sure there will be more written in the Steve Jobs legend.
Not so much a minor impact, but the nature of what he did, and why Apple has been so influential is predominantly a product placement and marketing triumph, not some Herculean feat of technological prowess.
THAT is what I’m getting at; Jobs is lauded as a technical genius when in reality, he was more of a marketing/product placement genius. Or someone on his staff was, anyway. By marketing themselves as hip, cool and pretty, they set themselves well apart from most other technological companies, whose products had an almost military-like “form follows function” philosophy.
But none of the actual technology involved was all that new or impressive- the real genius was in the way it was presented to the public and its suggested uses by them.
Sure, history will indeed judge.