Emailing back and forth with a college (and current) friend, this little anecdote of an encounter with Steve Jobs came up. It dates back to the ’80s when my friend was working for Lotus:
I had the pleasure to meet and speak with Steve Jobs in 1988 when he came to Lotus to persuade us to port our software to his new company’s operating system – NextStep. Of course, he provided us with an inspirational demo of his expensive, quirky, black, cube-shaped computer with the enormous monitor (even though it crashed during the demo!) I recall being unimpressed because it still had a black and white screen, although of extremely high resolution.
We did port some of our software to Next (123 and Improv come to mind). Jobs was a very demanding – some would say uncompromising – partner, constantly urging us to improve aspects of our software. But his demands made it better. He sent flowers to each team when they were done. NextStep turned out to be a great operating system – light years ahead of Windows. Jobs had made it an exceptional operating system. NextStep eventually became Mac OS X after Jobs returned to Apple.
Nothing extraordinary there, except as a pretty straightforward echo of everything I’ve heard about working for someone who is both visionary and capable of recruiting others to that vision.
I’ve never encountered any account that said Jobs was easy to work for.
But I’ve similarly not read or heard that he was impossible either. Rather, if you’re looking for what made him insanely great, it seems to me to lodge in this intersection of talents: the ability to construct and defend an artist’s take on a problem — the one that pounds the work until it is right, as defined by some almost Platonic idea of “right” — whilst also possessing that charisma that could recruit the talent and energy to drive an utterly collaborative process of creation.
Singular vision combined with a mastery of group endeavor? I’ve seen people try; every time I’ve made a documentary I’ve sought this combination myself. It’s terrifically difficult on even that kind of small scale. To do what Jobs did — while learning from the times he didn’t do it all that well — and to do it at such a high level for so long…that’s why we’re all so aware of someone special gone.
I’ve got one more thing to say about all this — but I’ll have to save that for the weekend. See y’all then.
Image: Adolph von Menzel The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes), 1872-1875 (I’ve used this before, I think on my own place. Still like it.)
JPL
but I’ll have to save that for the weekend
Excuse me? You write a compelling post and then say..well I ame sorry but ………………
SiubhanDuinne
Terry Gross had a little clip tonight, an excerpt from a much longer interview she did with Steve Jobs back in the . . . not sure when, sometime in the 1990s I think. He talked about the “bottom-up” structure of Apple and the importance of an egalitarian approach to ideas. A kind of anti-hierarchy. Sometime this weekend I’ll go to the Fresh Air website and listen to the entire conversation.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Tom Levenson is a tease. Everyone knows that.
Tom Levenson
@SiubhanDuinne: Nah. I’m a pretentious art douche. See updated byline above.
Corner Stone
Nothing like a man that denies paternity of his child. What a stud human being Jobs was.
eemom
let me just pop in quickly and say that this is a very nice post and then dash back out just in time to avoid getting trampled to death by the stampede of 10,000 assholes heading this way to make snide comments about “hagiography”.
eemom
Alas. Too late.
ABL
why the name change, tom?
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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@Corner Stone:
Some people learn and change for the better, Corner. Not these balloonbaggers, but some other people.
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Keith
Not intending to diss Jobs (and his claim to fame was largely built around polishing/refining existing tech), but NextStep was really just another Unix variant (as is Linux and therefore Android). And it pains me that Apple is *still* using Objective C, when everyone else has moved to managed code. In a grand irony (IMHO), Windows Phone is by far the easiest platform to code for, followed by Android, and followed wayyyy behind by iPhone; yet the popularity is the inverse of this order.
Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@ABL: because of this.
Made me happy.
Don’t worry though, I’ll lose the extra verbiage with the next post.
suzanne
From one pretentious art douche to another, please allow me to beg you to never, ever leave.
Though, in honor of Mr. Jobs, I might have rocked something typographic. It’s just so beautiful.
khead
Lotus still exists? Had to look that one up.
Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@Keith: Not to get into water deeper than I can handle, but getting any Linux variant into mainstream user/mass market form was a formidable task, and NextStep was the first to do so in a way that (though Next itself never flew) a millions-of-units platform like the Mac/OS X could run.
Linux is great. It is not consumer ware. Jobs great skill was in creating tools in which the engine of whatever it was doing was essentially transparent to the user. Much harder to do that than it seems.
This is all a long-winded way of saying I’ve never really grokked this criticism.
Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@suzanne: Garamond forever. A way cool image.
Corner Stone
Anybody watch Person of Interest on CBS tonite? I caught a smidge at the end and Jesus just blank faced some woman when she requested validation.
Kinda awesome.
Corner Stone
Who’s watching Cal v Oregon?
Keith
@Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson: It’s not really criticism, but people tend to make it out almost as if NextStep was purely a Jobs creation. Nothing wrong with taking Unix and running with it…until you add so much user-friendliness that you break the security of it (which Apple has done as of late, and Google will do as well, since they are so apt to rush releases out the door). Hell, Windows is a bit of a derivative of VMS (although not as directly as OSX/Android are to Unix), and they are all much more user-friendly than their ancestors. The key is maintaining the underlying benefits of the OSs while making them accessible to the masses.
opal
As it turns out, Steve Jobs ended up being an expert in marketing sugar water.
henry
Tom, your wikipedia entry asks for expansion. And I was thinking that mentioning Balloon Juice would be good, but your expanded byline could be omitted.
jron
I’m honestly tired of reading about Jobs, but I had to say that I loved the new byline.
Corner Stone
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Who, Uncle Clarence Thomas? Who?
In my estimation, the pure evil spread through the “kill list” thread below should be enough to put paid to the myth of human decency.
We’re amongst a bunch of god damned Philistines. And they all want to smite people hip and thigh.
It’s more than a little fucked to watch the glee people here have for someone meeting their end. Sight unseen, evidence, not provided. I enjoyed the 13 seconds in the US when we stopped and proved up our cases.
Sarah Proud and Tall
Hee.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tom Levenson:
“Tease” and “Pretentious Art Douche” aren’t mutually exclusive.
Nevgu
That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that he was a control freak. There are plenty of people out there who worked with him that will agree. Numerous documentaries about it as well.
Not saying it’s a bad thing. I think some of that is necessary to create great products. I won’t buy those products though. I’ll take the open configurable customizable Android over an iPhone any day.
Would never buy an Apple computer either.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
It was that same visionary genius that motivated him to resist the unionization of the janitorial service that mopped the floors and scrubbed the toilets of Apple’s Silicon Valley HQ.
It only took a hunger strike by the Justice for Janitors campaign to shame him into relenting.
A god among men.
mclaren
With this economy, we definitely need more Jobs.
:-)
opal
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Corner Stone is hammered.
What’s your excuse?
mclaren
@Keith:
Let me demur from your claim a bit here. Jobs took the Mach kernel and wrapped it in such a lusciously gorgeous user-friendly interface that it became a joy to use. Nobody ever did that with Unix before. Nobody.
Today, millions of Mac OS X users use Unix without having the slightest idea that’s what they’re doing, and they don’t have to memorize any goddamn arcane codes for file permissions or cron jobs or any of that stuff. Jobs was the first guy who did that. In fact, he’s still the only guy who was ever able to do that.
If you download Ubuntu or Red Hat or those other linux distros (and I have, and I occasionally use ’em), you’ll quickly learn that while there’s a superficial similarity twixt Mac OS X and the linux GUI, pretty damn soon you hit some problem where on a linux machine you have to type a bunch of gobbledygook into the terminal and you quickly descend into Dependency Hell.
I have never ever descended into Dependency Hell when using an OS X Mac. That’s a big deal. Jobs deserves huge kudos for that achievement. Many people tried to make unix user friendly-friendly, but only Jobs succeeded.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
The Tigers win the series! The Tigers win the series!
Corner Stone
@offal: What are you even blathering about?
Gin & Tonic
And a large dose of exploitation of workers. How many memorials to Jobs are up at the Foxconn plants?
Mike
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Well, that makes my day at least!
LM
I had a very small taste of this, putting ebooks into ebookstores, and comparing apple’s process to barnes & noble’s and amazon’s. B&N makes it a snap to upload a book for the nook. It converts the book to its format for you, so it’s a quick process. But during the conversion, a few formatting glitches crept in. I know they were on B&N’s end because the very same file went to Amazon’s kindle, uploading with equal ease, but displaying entirely different formatting glitches. The glitches weren’t bad, and trying to correct them (since they weren’t on my end) would have been a nightmare. The books were accepted in minutes and online within 24 hours, and bless nook and kindle for making it simple.
Compare that to Apple’s iBookstore. First you have to buy new ISBN numbers–you can’t use what was on the print versions. (Nook and kindle don’t require ISBNs.) Once you have the ISBNs, and if you have a mac with an intel chip (or you can’t upload), you fill out an application and wait to see if apple will let you publish there directly or force you to find an “aggregator,” a publisher of ebooks, to do it for you. Approval of the application is not assured, and can take a couple of weeks. Once you get that green light, it takes a while to set up your account. You have to download a couple of special programs. You are presented with a long contract, and you answer many questions and make many decisions. Then you convert your file–apple doesn’t do that for you, as kindle and nook do. More programs must be downloaded. After you upload the “package,” you wait weeks to hear from quality assurance. After about 3 weeks, I learned that mine had not passed muster. I found and downloaded better conversion and verification programs. Re-uploaded the packages. Waited and waited. Still didn’t get a green light. But I asked for and got a description of what had failed. To correct those things, I had to get a less baffling conversion program. I had to redo tables of contents and some other things that nook and kindle don’t require. Finally one book passed muster yesterday. I’m still waiting to hear about the others.
But here’s the thing: In terms of finished product, the kindle and nook store versions have sudden oddities in the margins, or a “praise of” page that’s inexplicably all in boldface. The books are still perfectly readable, just not perfect-looking. Apple’s ibookstore, otoh, not only made me convert my files myself, it made me redo and redo till the files looked sharp, tables of contents and all. This brought it home to me why, when I use my apple products, everything is so nice and glitchfree and standardized. I really do love my apple stuff.
eemom
@opal:
I like you.
ABL
@Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson: oh. i, for one, quite like your pretentious art douchebaggery.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@LM: I don’t think that finding the (very few) formatting glitches that Nook and Kindle put into my stuff is all that hard. I have no intention of even trying to sell through Apple.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@opal:
All this waxing poetic about Jobs and I’m wondering why he doesn’t get credit for the iBomb. ;)
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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@Corner Stone:
Why, I am a case study myself. Do you know I once believed that the races should not mix? That was before SUPER COKE! of course, and now I simply can’t get enough of it. There is harmony in interracial D/s sexuality, my friend.
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Darkrose
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): GO TIGERS!
I’m still holding out for the Tigers/Brewers WS.
tBone
@Gin & Tonic:
I’ve been seeing variants of this sentiment all over today. To which I say, if you’re so concerned about Chinese labor, please act on your principles – pitch your phone or computer, which was assembled at FoxConn or a facility very much like it, in the trash. You’ll get to feel even more self-righteous than you do now, and the rest of us won’t have to listen to your bullshit anymore. Win-win!
Donna
@Tom Pretentious Art Douche Levenson:
no, no — keep the name it’s tremendous and I really appreciate art douchery with my political analysis and shit!
Phylllis
So, no Elvis on black velvet masterpieces to choose from in your collection? And you call yourself a pretentious art douche. Harumph.
RSA
@LM:
That’s really interesting, LM. You’ve touched on one of the most difficult issues in interactive computing right now (or rather, one that’s become clear over the past decade or so). Historically, computer software was written by and for people who understood the machines inside and out. In the 1980s this changed, with software being written for people who might not really care about what goes on inside the machine; a graphical user interface hides an enormous amount of complexity. In the 1990s, with the creation of the Web, interactive software changed again, to accommodate millions of new users who would create “content”. Today (actually, it’s been a continuing trend but has just become obvious) people without much computing expertise would like to create full-on applications.
It’s estimated that there are four times as many people who write programs as people who call themselves programmers. They might be writing spreadsheet or word processing macros, or scripts for specialized applications, or dabbling in Javascript, but it’s still programming, though often in a non-traditional sense. We (meaning computer scientists and computer science educators) are still trying to figure out how to make end-user programming work.
THE
Interesting article about Steve Jobs’ Syrian family connections.
haenck
Given the current level of, yes, hysteria- perhaps Obama could get his “jobs bill” passed if he changed it to a “Steve Jobs bill.”
MonkeyBoy
Cain’s just out book, “This Is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House” which he is heavily promoting could use some input on its Amazon tags page.