Steve Jobs Insult Response - Highest Quality

This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference]( ▶ this video ) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.

Reminded me of this video: "Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference." ▶ this video

Hah. These are the same weirdos who spoke like this to Jobs: ▶ this video There's a big difference between geeks and hippies. Too many of the former here and not enough of the latter here - people who can understand other people, culture etc and then think about how technology can fit into ones life.

Something like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook). ▶ this video > You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative. And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind ▶ this video Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.

This is quite a defensive posture. In my current role I've been able to see an incredible raft of insanity, not be obtuse or arrogant enough to dismiss solutions or the intelligence of those who made them, but literally make a communal list of refactor candidates. Then slowly but surely wrangle people and political capital to my side to eventually change them. Years later we still have cruft leftover but there are many many projects, some multi-year, which are now complete. I also see a single-mindedness to specific technical implementations where a more mature view would be to see tech as a business and us less as artisans than blue collar workers. > steve jobs on "You're right, but it doesn't matter" ▶ this video

> As Jobs said in his chat, "we put a gun to their heads and shot them dead". (I'm paraphrasing Jobs here, but he said something close to that - it was equally brutal, anyway.) Say good-bye to PowerTalk, OpenDoc, Copland, and their ilk. Good riddance, I say. At least one man was very upset with this. ▶ this video

But he was also famously reasonable at times when most people would have been just mean. [0] He had a complex and conflicting personality. [0] ▶ this video

Most of the people who worked directly under Steve Jobs knows he is an Asshole. At the same time they all loves him. You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. [1] ▶ this video

That was never Apple's thing. Apple always changes things as it pleases and expects the developers to suck it up. ▶ this video

Had to change the channel. Must have been live. It was funny the first time, but he insisted on repeating it, and he sounded a little unhinged. Seems like a certain lack of emotional development. I don't want Musk to be a polished corporate drone but the most interesting people express themselves in a more controlled manner. Something I haven't mastered but I try not to disconnect my brain and cut loose. It never ends wells. For Steve Jobs' reputation, he seemed to have learned, at least publicly: ▶ this video

Once you choose a path, the cost of switching compounds. And truthfully language makes much less of a difference than we engineers feel it does. Can't say it better than Mr Jobs himself on this subject. [0] ▶ this video

The interesting thing is that had OpenDoc took off, the Mac would’ve moved more toward the component-based ecosystem that you describe instead of an ecosystem of monolithic applications: link Alas, OpenDoc was a product of “interregnum” Apple, a font of innovation but had no singular vision (OpenDoc was one of many visions Apple promoted in the mid-1990s as the future of Mac development) and a track record of failed projects (Pink/Taligent then Copland). When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he brought and enforced a singular vision for the Mac, one that revolved around NeXT technology. OpenDoc was killed under these circumstances: ▶ this video

Musk is right in wanting "high velocity of features," i.e., the ability to evolve Twitter faster. How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much, as long as he has capable technical people working with him. It's likely that they are the ones telling Musk they need to rewrite big chunks of Twitter's infrastructure. Given that WhatsApp was able to grow to ~500 million users with only 32 employees, it's quite possible they're right. I'm reminded of this confrontational interaction between a technical person and Steve Jobs: ▶ this video -- in hindsight, Jobs was right : "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," not the other way around.

▶ this video The libre/open app issue has been brought up by Apple nay-sayers for time immemorial; Steve Job's response is brilliant here, frankly quite timeless and ultimately (in my view) apropos. "You've gotta start from the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."

That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. link >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo [LIN

Much of what Joel says here - especially the conclusion at the end - is also mirrored in what Steve Jobs said when confronted over shutting down OpenDoc: "You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and figure out where you're gonna sell it." ▶ this video

i can't advise you on what to do -- but i have opinions on things! i think being somewhat educated about tech and programming can be a help as a founder, but only to a certain extent. and even if you're a techie, you won't necessarily know how to be a good manager of an outsourced project. i've learned a bit over the years, but am still a newbie. i've never seen a single quality article, here or at any other site, that talked about HOWTO outsource a project well. other downsides to being a techie is that you start paying attn to tech instead of solutions to problems. way i see it, you build something, then you find/hire someone to help you take it over, maintain it, improve it, fix it, expand it, throw it away and build again, whatever. if you built some site that was becoming successful, and it was complete trash that nobody could work on, or it just coudln't scale enough, or whatever -- then you've got a great fucking problem on your hands -- you've got traffic and/or a business -- most people never get that far. now just do what is necessary, including throwing away what you have at that point if you have to. other advice -- you'll burn out on programming one day and won't want to do it ever again, and it will jump on you and you'll be like, 'shit'. so, i would suggest waiting around to form some SUPERBUSINESS might not be the best stategery. if you care about maintainability of your code, then that puts you in the top 1% of contractors. the sum-up -- being a techie, on th

For those interested, AllAboutSteveJobs.com keeps a pretty good repository of Jobs moments. My personal favorite is his 1997 WWDC talk [1]. In one talk he demonstrates what it is to be a great leader organizationally, publicly, and as a product visionary. He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today. He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy. Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments. [1] (full video): link [2] (insult excerpt): ▶ this video

All in the name of UI cleanliness and simplicity . Like how there's no way to manually trigger the firmware update for the AirPods. You just have to keep them plugged in next to your iPhone and ... wait ... until some magic pixie in Apple's cloud decides it's time to push the update to you. Steve Jobs used to say it over and over again when criticized by angry developers[1] that their main focus will always be users instead of developers and that the latter will just have to suck it up if they want to get a piece of the lucrative Apple user base pie. In comedic contrast, here's a sweaty Steve Balmer shouting "Developers!" for half a minute.[2] Ah, the early 2000's, with Apple and Microsoft battling it out, what a time to be alive. [1] ▶ this video [2] link