I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).
Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of Graham Chapman:
[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather, the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python
Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable, complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of surrounding yourself with great people and getting them all working together is underrated.
Even if Steve Jobs contributed nothing to the ideas that were developed (which is unlikely, based on what I've heard), he still deserves the praise for being the human gravitational well that pulled all those people to work together and create awesome products.
Jobs himself has said what Apple (and he) has compared to others is "taste." I believe that to be true.
In relation to the human side (leading people), what Jobs has going for him is "judgement."
The older I get, the thing that attracts me to certain leaders is good judgement. Without that, a leader is a manager and not a very good one.
Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.
Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...
That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.
Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)
Sure, there were predecessors and prototypes. Sure, he had a ton of help. I count more than 3 decades of contribution so far. How many times does he have to be at the helm of a fundamental change before we stop having this discussion?
Link? IIRC the term "iPod" was intended to be used for another product that may have preceeded Jobs' return but I this is the first I've heard about a portable mp3 player being developed at Apple before Jobs came back.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-more-th...
Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.
I still think that Steve Jobs is cool, though.
that's not true..
This probably doesn't need repeating, but there are a lot of hackers out there who appreciate a UNIX OS that works out of the box, runs commercial software not available on Linux, and can easily sync with your iPhone.
The world would be a better place.
The hardware? Some has been good. Some really advanced to their time. Some G4Cube-ish.
I have to admit the guy is brilliant.
The functional design of the iPhone was a surprise to no one, everyone wanted it, Apple delivered.
There are many operating system, but OSX is still an asset to Apple.
It may be the case that Apple has great ideas, but they certainly have great execution.
