This Dianamania is a slur on Jobs Steve Jobs was a remarkable and fascinating businessman, and by some distance the most interesting and accomplished personality operating in an important corner of the economy. He had a respect for the intelligence of human beings and their ambition, and potential – showing an optimism which is rare in a cynical industry. And …
What a load of cobblers. For a start, big label monopolies kept dribbling turtlenecked wannabees and their weak music back in their moms basements where they belonged. The 95% of people without macs happily produce videos, graphics and muscic and websites. The fact you have used iweb to produce a website proves you are clueless.
>If Apple had not invested in Adobe there would be no computer based graphic design.
There were several desktop publishing tools around at the time like Corel Draw/Paint, Autocad etc. If apple had not existed one of these or any other package would have moved in to close the gap.
I would suggest the only reason apple when with adobe was they could get the best deal money wise.
apple focused on the liberal arts side because it worked out that these people were sheep and once under control they would follow apple right to the end and pay extra money to do it.
Astonishingly I agree with a lot of what Andrew's said. But Dianamania? I don't think so, from my corner of the internets it seems to have mostly died down already. I remember only to well the Diana stuff - seemed to go on for weeks and I turned on the radio to escape it on the TV (only to find every channel on the radio was broadcasting 'live' coverage of her funeral).
But he was a visionary! And now he's nothing but a polo neck blowing in the wind...
Look to your right, look to your left, look in front of, look behind you, infact just have a general good look around. Does the world look promising? Does it look stable? Do you still think those nutters who built Y2K fall out shelters are nutters? Well obviously they are, but a nice nuclear bunker and its own energy creation system sounds like a good idea to me right now...
Jobs was a synthesist. His job wasn't to _invent_ the iPod, OS X, or the iPhone, but to _enable their creation_. He created the conditions in which these products _could_ be made. He brought together the right brains, the right talent, and _let them get on with it_. He backed-up his people. He ensured their visions weren't subject to the thousand cuts of the accountants and CFO. He _believed_ in his people—hence his infamous tirade when the MobileMe launch went so badly: he'd _trusted_ that team to get it right!
This is the exact _opposite_ of Dilbert's PHB.
Jobs also had an education in the arts as well as technology—something Bill Gates lacked. Jobs was as comfortable building a database application in NeXTStep as he comfortable discussing the way the machine he was doing it on _looked_. (Even so, neither part of that NeXTStep video ever involved him writing any code.)
The products he helped to launch were never about the bullet-point specs lists of the PC world, but about _what they let the user *DO*_. You don't see "x GB" written in big letters in the marketing blurb: you see "x thousand songs, y hundred videos". The latter are what mortal humans understand. Only techies understand what "64 GB" means.
Above all, Jobs understood that most consumers aren't "dumb", the way TheDailyWTF and its ilk like to claim. They're just _ignorant_.
And so are you. Yes, all of you. And me. I have no clue how to weld girders together. I am more than happy to wear denim, but have no idea how it works. Quantum mechanics—even basic algebra—is alien to me. I've never even heard a "Lady Ga Ga" song, and I can't see the point of Twitter.
The list of stuff I don't know is endless; there simply isn't enough time to learn everything there is to learn. And the same problem applies to everyone reading this website, and all their friends.
_Everyone_ is ignorant. They're just ignorant in different subjects.
And that means you don't make a device easy for consumers to use by merely dumbing it down. You make it easy to use by _working out how a feature *should* work, from the end user's point of view_.
I've been just as surprised by all the articles complaining that the new iPhone 4S has no particularly impressive features in it, despite the long presentation explaining what may prove to be the next big step in UX: voice recognition. Siri brought the first draft of the technology, but it really needed deep integration into the OS to reach its potential. If Apple can get it refined enough to work consistently as well as it did in that launch event, the days when every device came with either a virtual, or physical, keyboard may well be numbered.
And that makes even multi-touch displays yesterday's news.
That is what I mean about taking risks: the speech stuff could flop badly—it wouldn't be the first time Apple tripped up—but there's a hell of a lot of UX potential here, so it's worth the gamble. And, thanks to the influence and management legacy of Steve Jobs, user experiences are what Apple does best.
Was he perfect? No. He clearly didn't suffer fools gladly.
His track record also reveals an awful lot of good luck helped his career, particularly through the 1990s, but he had enough intelligence to recognise that luck and take advantage of it.
So, no, he's not god. He never was. He's certainly not an Edison or a Tesla, as some others have suggested. Both of those people were hands-on inventors. They were the "Jonathan Ive" of their day, getting their hands dirty in their workshops, and leading their fellow researchers.
And he was no Brunel, either. Brunel managed to ruin quite a few of his backers. He was a good engineer, but a mediocre businessman!
Thing is, good speech recognition has been available on PCs for many years, and smartphones for a year or two, and it is almost exclusively a niche product - the only large-ish groups of people I know who use it regularly are those who are disabled such that a keyboard is not a viable option, and lawyers, for whom keyboards are still an anti-status symbol, dinosaurs that they are.
Still, we shall see. Perhaps the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field will continue to pervade the industry after his death, and Apple will succeed with speech recognition where all others have failed. I won't be betting the farm on that, however.
GJC
Speech will come. There is a place for perfect speech recognition, because we all talk from time to time.
It won't take over. When I'm writing I don't speak the words aloud as I scrawl, even when I'm alone.
It's not even efficient. Dictation is only really beneficial for those who normally speak faster than can they think and in an ideal world, that would be a deservedly small market.
One of the key reasons speech recognition hasn't been taken up on a PC is rather obvious. It tends to take almost as long to train a speech recognition system to your voice as it takes to learn to type faster than you can talk. Certainly my 60-80 words per minute is faster than I can dictate into a voice recognition program.
On mobiles it might be different. Current data entry on mobiles suck. The touch keyboards are a very bad compromise, they work ok for some people and dreadfully for others (like me). Small mobile phone physical keyboards aren't much better - and in some cases are actually worse.
The problems with speech on mobiles is that often you are using a mobile in an environment where you can't speak - which is why you are emailing or texting in the first place. On a tube train, in the lift, in an open plan office, etc.
It seems that the 'other' Steve (Wozniak) gets left out of the Apple picture. Without Woz, and Turing, and Whitworth and the team that invented the transistor and a few others BEFORE Jobs, there would not be this consumer giant called Apple. I agree wjholeheartedly with the article, Jobs did some good things in the computer industry but it is not and was not world making.
Jobs on a peprsonal level also was subject to human vulnerability and did some unpleasant things to a few others. He shouldn't be pilloried for those weaknesses but he isn't the messiah. Remember him as you will but he could be likened to Howard Hughes as an off beat visionary entrepreneur.
just the inventor - the hands-on nuts-and-chips engineer who actually built things.
Jobs took the credit and most of the cash for his work - as he did time and again in the future, with other engineers who remain unknown to most of the population.
Jobs was basically a salesman - and a capitalist saint. He proved that if you were ruthless enough and shiny enough you could invent legions of followers in your own image.
He sold his enduringly high self-esteem and sense of creative entitlement. Sometimes it looked like a computer, sometimes it looked like an MP3 player, sometimes it looked like a piece of software.
But always, just owning it made you as special as Jobs wanted to feel.
Is the result great? If you like homogeneity, sure. The main artistic contribution made by Jobs was to enable the creation of a style-over-substance computer-generated art/design stream - most of which is disposable and mediocre, and has turned Design into something every kebab shop can have sandblasted on its windows.
Real creativity is more challenging and dangerous. Sometimes it's also bloody hard work. But if you're one of the many who thinks owning a Mac makes you artistic, you've already missed the most important thing you need to know.
Jobs didn't cure cancer, he didn't give much money to charity - for all his faults, Bill G has been far more consistently generous - and he was always closing the sale.
In the end he was more famous for being a celebrity than anything else - and for implying that owning an Apple product made you a celebrity too.
Of course, it doesn't. But this culture values the superficial over the kick-you-in-the-face real, and Jobs was a perfect exemplar of dreaming big while selling something really quite trite and trivial.
"Jobs didn't cure cancer, he didn't give much money to charity - for all his faults, Bill G has been far more consistently generous - and he was always closing the sale."
Actually, before Gates' wife Melinda got him to set up the charitable foundation in their names, Gates was NOT generous. His charatible donations took the form of Microsoft software to schools, where MS was looking to tap into the market that Apple had pretty much to themselves. Also, for the purposes of PR, the cost of the sofware was worked out as if someone had bought individual copies on the high street, when that obviously isn't the cost to Gates (I mean, he isn't going to get a staff discount?). Gates was publicly criticised for keeping his hands in his pockets by the likes of Ted Turner. In the entertaining book, 'The Plot to Get Bill Gates' there's plenty of info about this. Also, in the early days of the Foundation, they didn't like to "talk about what was being given away in financial terms, but how much good it does" as a spokesman said to R4 in a documentary.
This isn't to knock the work that the Gates' Foundation does now, but Melinda was/is the driving force and it's very misleading to to suggest that her hudband's generousity has been "consistent."
If the invention was a hardware architecture that used fewer chips to do more, then sure Woz was the inventor. If the invention was actually the realisation of how re-positioning the microcomputer as an appliance could get them into the hands of millions of ordinary people, and what was needed to do that, in terms of features, look, production facilities, startup funding, management and articulating a proposition that ordinary people would understand then probably Jobs was the inventor. You can demean that by calling it 'sales' if you like but no serious analyst of business processes would take you seriously.
Woz is often forgotten. A reading of the 1984 Byte interviews with the Max design team makes interesting reading.
"Remember him as you will but he could be likened to Howard Hughes as an off beat visionary entrepreneur."
Nice simile. Without the *alleged* liking for teen age girls of course.
"insanely great" ideas? We'll see what people are using in 10 years.
Greatly insane? I rather suspect he was on occasions. Trouseringa $5k in bonus fees "Because I could" is rather a curious definition of "friendship" wouldn't you say?
I'm sure Woz was a genious in terms of getting more out of a few hundred logic gates than the next guy back in the 70s, but have you ever listened to any interview given by Woz? He has little of consequence to say about anything. Honestly the difference in scope between the achievements and vision of the two Steves is huge. Sure they both made an input into the original Apple, but which one do you really think was less replaceable by someone else? I think events since then show this pretty clearly.
I have to agree with the general gist of the article. Job's made a company huge by making better personal computers, music players, smartphone and tablets than the rest. That's a very remarkable achievement but to suggest that he changed the world on his own is plain bullshit. As far as devices are concerned, only his latest baby, the iPad was truly leading the pack.
They were not actually better, they were just better marketed and they had a fan base that would buy anything as long as it had an apple label.
Fo proof if the iPad was so much better why should apple being trying all sorts of dirty tricks to stop the opposition. Me thinks to stop a superior product .
Steve Jobs' second greatest achievement is transforming Apple from a company - in 1997 - that was on its last legs and considered irrelevant by almost everyone into the powerhouse and leader that it is today.
The final chapter in Jobs' legacy is yet to be written however. Hopefully in five or ten years we'll be able to say that Steve's greatest achievement was building a 'system' at Apple that was able to continue to lead and innovate after his death.
"Hopefully in five or ten years we'll be able to say that Steve's greatest achievement was building a 'system' at Apple that was able to continue to lead and innovate after his death."
I'd like to think you're right, but it's far more likely that Apple will end its days by the Death of a Thousand Committees. The company was very close to going tits-up before he came back to lead it, and they don't seem to have anyone with his charisma and ability who could replace him.
A firm of Apple's size - according to Wikipedia they employ 50,000 people - will have a fair number of second-rate drones, career politicians and talentless gobshites who will try to float to the top of the toilet bowl. While doing so, there's a better then even chance that they'll stifle whatever creative ability Apple still has. Genuine innovation is a very different beastie from just adding more bells and whistles to an established product line; and professional management drones tend to suffer from chronic Not Invented Here syndrome.
Unless Apple has someone with Jobs' charisma and vision waiting in the wings, they may not be around in ten years time.
Pint, because although I don't like Apple's products or business model, I have the utmost respect for what Steve Jobs achieved. Rest in peace, mate.
This article definitely has a point - and it's something I always considered when reading about Jobs and Apple. The adulation did get a little too much at times, but heck, ignore it. People get over excited about all sorts of stuff.
Dragging Stephen Fry into this really is a poor show. The man will admit he's unashamedly an incurable gadget geek who has been following tech as a *user* of it for decades. He's a damn fine fellow. If Douglas Adams was around today, he would also be waxing lyrical about the genius of Jobs.
And what's wrong with that?
Nothing!
Put your prejudices aside and look at the bigger picture from every angle.
Apple dominated first the music industry and then the mobile industry - they dragged it into the mainstream, making it fun and usable.
It's only the tiny fraction of geeks who bemoan the "walled garden" approach. Everyone else just enjoys the tech and gets on with life.
He was an incredibly astute businessman (very much like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Scott McNealy, Tim Siebel, Ray Noorda, Sir Richard Branson, etc.) who got very well rewarded for the effort he put in.
He wasn't a great humanitarian and didn't try to use his vast wealth to help others, even after he cheated immediate death in 2004 (or at least not that I've heard of)
So is he really worthy of the hero worship he was the subject of in life and now in death? I don't think so.
The true heros and heroines in my book are those that use the resources they have acquired to help those less fortunate than themselves.
Gates, like Jobs has the reputation of being a ruthless businessman, but at least now he is trying to give back which is to be applauded.
Jobs on the other hand lost his humility as Apple got stronger and stronger.
Compare his 1998 keynote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mt79UR4SxM with his 2007 keynote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyx_va6f10s
Enough said I think.
RIP Steve Jobs, a very clever and astute human being among many clever astute human beings.
MS made a small investement, which is cashed in fairly quickly and made a nice little profit. The significance was the public move to show that Apple was still a going concern and to show the world that MS didn't have a monopoly, as a defence against the anti-trust suit (so there was something in it for both companies). It helped Apple but to say that it saved Apple is a little like saying Steve Jobes was the most genius genuis EVAH!
BTW, Gates didn't write the Mac software itself - however, the Mac Business Unit consistently made a very decent profit for MS. In the 1990s, if someone bought a Mac with MS Office, Apple made a smaller profit than MS, which I think help shows how much of a nice little earner it was for MS.
2 musicians literally a *generation* apart.
And what a contrast in expressive styles.
Sadly no John Peel around to listen to CC's effort and declare if "That's orrible" as well.
Although I guess collecting the royalties *should* be a bit simpler these days.
As one of the founders of HP observed change is the *only* constant.
This is such a "British" post.. the cynicism in this country, the lack of respect of achievement, the belittleing of everything done... its astounding!
The mark of someones achievement in this world is what happens when you erase their life from history. How much of that person is connected to how we live now. Regardless of what effort it took or didnt take to do this stuff, its incredible to deny the contribution.
No, Jobs did not invent penicillin, or cure small pox, or make water clean.
But the way you do what you do now in your everday life is down to him and people like Bill Gates etc...
You didnt have personal computers, you didnt use a mouse, you didnt drag windows around a screen, you didnt swipe your phone, you didnt have a laptop etc..
its not to say that he invented things, no he "curated". He is an editor. A leader. Thats why people are celebrating him. His achievement is of "leader" not inventor.
To say that means nothing is to disregard people like Churchill because he didnt hold a gun!
John Lennon got more praise and that guy just sung songs!
I got my 'personal computer' which was far more advanced than any PC or Mac in its day - and
it had draggable windows...all at different resolutions.... Amiga
of course, what happened to Amiga just as the iMac was being outed is probably the worlds biggest loss in terms of computing freedom and ability. Still...20 years later its still going - OS4 updates
keep coming out. the OS is exactly what others have been trying to make theirs operate like now for the past 20 years..
Steve was a very good CEO.
He was able to get the general public to pay over the for his mediocre tech.
From the very earliest times, Apple Fanbois REALLY believed that Apple kit was better than the rest, and were therfore willing to pay extra for it.
Once they'd paid too much, they HAD to convince themselves it was worth every penny. And so it went on - to this day.
The proof of this pudding, is in the HUGE pot of cash that Apple has, purely by overcharging for it's tech. If it didn't overcharge by such a great margin, it wouldn't have built up such an obscene Cash pot on it's customers stupidity.
I use a Mac Mini, but only because the one piece of software I wanted above all others (Scrivener) only runs on a Mac. Nice box - small and quiet, but it's just a means to an end, and I permanently run Windows XP in a VMWare Fusion window because all the other good software I use is Windows-only. Never had any desire to own an iPhone (my mobile's top feature is an LED torch - it doesn't even have a camera and cost me a tenner, new). My desire to accumulate gadgets ended at the introduction of the DVD player and I prefer single-function devices.
In all this I suspect that I am not a typical Reg reader.
Steve Jobs' visions are wasted on me. I can't say I'll miss him, but I'll eat a Braeburn or two as a mark of respect... as I watch the world pass me by from my Luddite sanctuary.
The Dianamania is a natural reaction to the passing of the man, because he shared a number of things with Diana.
He was mega-famous, up there with movie stars and rock stars.
He was also accessible to regular people. Answering emails, answering questions at the AGM, interacting with grunt level workers at Apple. Jobs clearly never forgot the day he got his break from Bill Hewlett.
He was charismatic, and we got a dose of that charisma every time he gave a keynote or an interview.
The combination is powerful, and results in people mourning a connection to a guy they never new, because they're mourning the connection that they might have made.
Like many other commenters around the world regarding Steve Jobs, the author here appears to show a shocking lack of understanding of the achievements that he made over his lifetime. Instead, they seem to focus on the showy bits. The bits that had 'i' in front of them.
What about the early Apple stuff? Where his eye for the future changed the computing industry? The one which gave this journalist his job 30 years down the line?
Sure, you can try and claim that online shopping is still just shopping, and that information on the internet is often inaccurate, but that's kinda like viewing the Great Wall of China and saying 'meh, its a wall'. Or Roman roads, and saying 'meh, they're roads'.
The knock on effect of the technologies that Jobs popularised, built from smaller bits of tech that existed before but languished in labs, or in technological niches, is huge.
To ignore those consequences is to ignore the whole point that Jobs was on about - think big, think of the future and think different.
At least we knew it was coming and there were no special circumstances* of his death. Many popular figures get similar accolades when they die especially when they were recently in the spotlight and haven't had time to fade away. It doesn't matter who you are as long as you are famous, consider Walt Disney, Michael Jackson, etc.
*special circumstances in that there is no mystery for the media to solve and drag the story on for months.
But Andrew isn't criticising the reporting of Job's death, or denying that he was a significant figure in the computing industry. It's the 'most significant human being of the 20th century' (©Stephen Fry and repeated in almost all mainstream media) that he's justly lambasting - nobody claimed that for Walt Disney or Michael Jackson.
I think part of the problem is that these commentators move in a self-contained bubble. All their friends and acquaintances have iPhones and iPads and therefore everyone in the world must use them - or, at least, everyone that counts, in their view. Whereas, in reality Apple have a 10% share of the PC market and 20% of the *smartphone* market (in the US - you can halve those figures on a worldwide basis) - an amazing achievement for a company that was once moribund, but not the ubiquity that they perceive.
As title.
If a person is relatively unknown maybe there is a high probability for that person's "passing away" to be relatively under reported?
If a person is relatively well known maybe there is a high probability for that person's "passing away" to be relatively well reported?
If a person is relatively over known maybe there is a high probability for that person's "passing away" to be relatively over reported?
I do lament the passing away of Mr Jobs - the world is a sadder place without him.
Did the author do his own illustrations, perhaps?
A dedicated graphics professional would at least have made sure all the pictures were flipped the right way round. And don't get me started on the speech-bubble typography.
Ironically, that Job's legacy. Empowering millions of semi-competent people to dabble in creative activities that are best left to those who actually know what they're doing.
To paraphrase Dennis Potter's Signing Detective: they think they can draw and write, "every busy little schmuck who can hold a pen the right way up."
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