Amazing Innovations? Stop drinking the kool aid, he was a pro at taking existing technology and making it marketeable to the masses. He took clunky tech and made it more appealing to average joe, whilst restricting them to his ecosystem. Yes he was a good business man, but GOAT is stretching it.
Apple/Jobs took a Palm and mashed it together with an mp3 player and made it attractive and easy to use. not much innovation. just iteration. remember also that it took many versions of ipod before reaching a product that was truly functional and useful, as we know them today. good products but not incredibly innovative.
Uh, the FIRST version of iPod was differentiated by one key feature: you could take your WHOLE music library with you at once, and it would fit in your pocket. When I first heard about the iPod, I thought “big deal,” but about a week or two later, after struggling with the other MP3 players out there, it suddenly dawned on me why this was amazing.
There was an ARCHOS out there that did something similar, and could even carry movies, but it was big and heavy, and about the size of a large paperback book. Functionally it was a challenger, but “fitting in your pocket” was a key feature.
And iphone/ipod touch wasn’t really an iteration of Palm, it was an interation of Newton (as was Palm). Jobs didn’t invent the Newton - but he did benefit from the technology still owned by Apple.
I am struck by the fact that Apple hasn’t really created anything earthshattering since the iPad, which is now about 4 years old. In Jobs’ later years, he was introducing category-changing products on average about once every 2 or 3 years (iMacs with all those colors, iPod, iPhone, iPad).
There were some that flailed too, AppleTV, the MotoROKR, the hockeypuck mouse but the successes were way bigger than the failures.
I agree that Jobs had something of a reality distortion field that made people go crazy, but it definitely did generate $$$ for the company.
Apple still makes nice stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be evolving very fast. I wonder how long it can rest on its laurels with what are essentially incremental advances. I do kinda like the thin iMacs though. The new MacPro is kinda cool-looking too.
so you’re saying apple just copied archos jukebox? from what i see, apple saw the archos jukebox, waited 1 year until hard drive technology caught up and could offer similar capacity at 2/3 the size (thus fit in your pocket). archos offered a portable version months after the “portable” ipod was released.
not much innovation in my opinion. all they really did was make it look attractive and slightly more functional than its peers.
again. jobs was a good businessman, not an innovator. the reason apple was successful vs. it peers was that apple was able to build a brand (something a businessman does, not an innovator) and it offered complimentary products at a time when media and portable media devices were separate things. (iPod + iPhone + iMac + iTunes + etc).
Apple built a brand because its products were superior to those of its rivals. The innovation came from taking various pieces of technology already widely available and integrating them better than anyone else and packaging in a way that was better than anyone else. To say Jobs was not an innovator is completely incorrect. There would have been no iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad (or Toy Story and Finding Nemo!) if it hadn’t been for Jobs. Sure after a few years we’d have gotten similar but inferior versions of the above, but his genius was to have a vision and work his team to obsessively high standards to make the above products better than their rivals.
Interesting anecdotes about Jobs (from his biography which I highly recommend):
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He apparently signed off on all the company’s advertising. Imagine the CEO of Nike or Coke or Ford signing off on all their advertising in all markets globally!
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He was responsible for the interior design of the apple stores right down to choosing the tiles. He signed off on every last detail.
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He used to sign off on every product (including packaging) that Apple produced. Less surprising I know. But he was truely obsessive on detail. Apparently he went through more than a dozen iterations of the Mac Air before he was willing to go to market. Other laptops up to then were functional but ugly and heavy. He wanted it to be light and beautiful. And he succeeded in a way that no-one else in the industry had been able to before (and many have since copied). That is innovation.
“Better” is subjective. IOS is restrictive and only lets you do what Apple wants you to do, why else do people jailbreak their phones and iPads? He stripped down the tech, getting rid of all the stuff that only computer nerds would appreciate or know how to use and provided clean, easy-access products anybody can pick up and within 10 minutes become proficient at operating it. 8 year old kids can work an iPad with ease. Although something like a Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab can technically do more and is more powerful, you need to be fairly competent in order to get the best out of it.
Did Jobs write Toy Story or Nemo? Pretty sure he didn’t. Did he Direct? Nope. What about editing? Nope. Music? Pretty sure had zero input in those films besides owning Pixar and if they didn’t do the movie i’m sure someone else would have bankrolled it eventually. He’s credited as an “Executive Producer” in all their movies and did nothing but provide cash.
All those anecdotes you listed are traits of an obsessive businessman with the resources to get his product the way he wanted.
I’m not sure if you’re trolling or what but this is turning into a Steve Jobs argument when the focus should be on Apple. Apple is still a decent investment, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They will keep roughly the same market share in the phone market at least, until somebody comes out with a gamechanger. I can’t see it happening though, what more can phones do for us that they don’t already? I don’t really need an extra 10gb of RAM in my phone or an ultra-mega-super-HD screen that the human eye can’t even see a difference. Everything we use day-to-day is already portable, the internet has accelerated our access to everything. They’ve got music locked down though, they got there first with iTunes and mp3s, people (who actually pay for music) will keep doing so on iTunes for some time.
Not trolling at all. Tell me this, if you don’t admire Steve Jobs what business person do you hold in high regard? Jobs built up a company from scratch to make it the largest in the world. In the process he revolutionised modern consumer electronics (or at the very least had a greater impact on the industry than any other person in modern times).
I find it interesting that a lot of the time online when Warren Buffett gets mentioned people are pretty disparaging about his track record too (despite it being phenomenal). Do some people just like knocking others who achieve great success?
I appreciate the concept of fooled by randomness. That someone inevitably at any given time will achieve great success predominately due to luck. But the opposite is not necessarily true: that all hugely successful people are lucky.
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Can’t say I admire anybody tbh. If anything, I like underdogs, college or high school dropouts with hustle that become CEOs. Not cookie-cutter Harvard MBA types who have the exact same path and background as a hundred other executives.
If you look at Jobs’ past (put up for adoption by his mother, dropped out of Reed College, hustle to put together the first Macintosh, etc.), it sounds like you should admire Jobs. If anything he was “Not [a] cookie-cutter Harvard MBA type who has the exact same path and background as a hundred other executives.”
I think the debate is whether you have to invent absolutely everything from scratch to be considered an innovator. The original mac OS was developed at Xerox PARC and he bought it so he could stick it in his Mac, but he still designed (along with Woz) the way the first macs would look, which was very different from other computers at the time. There was also the Apple ][, which was very successful.
And before the iPhone, it’s true, there were cell phones, even a blackberry, with its functional but incredibly ugly browser.
The best description, perhaps, is that Jobs was more of an industrial artist. Maybe you can say that a particular artist isn’t really an innovator because lots of them have painted landscapes and Maddona-and-childs, or that they didn’t mix their own paints from ground stone and pigfat, but had someone else do it. But the truth is that he put stuff together in a way that resonated with a lot of people and changed the categories so much that we now assume that “it eventually would have gotten that way anyway.” And he did it multiple times, and by the end of his life, he even managed to do it profitably (unlike Apple in the 1980s and 1990s).
We assume that all smartphones would be finger-touch driven by now, but when iPhone was introduced, the idea of doing something like that without a stylus was revolutionary. Most people thought that fingers were just not defined enough to do the precision pointing that you could do with a stylus or mouse. But changing the operating system to accomodate it turned out to be a unique solution.
To me, that’s innovative enough to call him an innovator. In the same way that an artist like Salvador Dali can paint a madonna-and-child, and a Jesus-down-from-the-cross and still be considered innovative. I get that you can look at the evolution of tech and see predecessors that experimented with one idea or another, but to get it right and done in a way that people gravitate to, and to do it repeatedly… tell me what tech company has accomplished that repeatedly with multiple products in multiple categories (e.g. computers, phones, music players, music purchasing)… in my mind, Sony comes the closest, but even that train has slowed.
yeah i think you’re right bchad. its more a question of semantics. i think jobs had a clear vision (to create a company with sleek, easy-to-use products that are all connected)… and from that vision, apple was innovative. without jobs’s vision, those who worked at apple could not have been as innovative. not all innovation has to be the theory of relativity, i suppose, but i think it is clear that many who worked at apple were more innovative than jobs himself. jobs’s enabled those people.
I do admire his background, as said, he’s a great businessman and a CEO I would believe in. I personally don’t see him as an innovator, maybe you’re right and for me it has to be something completely unlike what we have seen before. It was the “greatest genius of modern times” comment that I disagreed with.
OK. That’s a fair comment. I probably veered in hyperbole there!
I’m also aware that I’ve totally side-tracked this thread and I don’t even have a good investment tip to share.
I think Jobs was a pretty good innovator.
Bchad already laid he argument and that reminds me of how luggage evolved. Wheels on luggage was an idea patented in 1972. It seems pretty obvious, but before that travelers had to carry their bags around with much greater effort. And the retractable handle was invented in 1990. Even some AF members may have traveled by pulling some weird leash in front of their bags.
However, as most here, I don’t think he can be called best CEO of all time or nothing close to that.
Borrowing a concept from Good to Great, he was not a “level 5” leader - he was awesome while running the show, but apparently was not able to instill a culture that allowed Apple to work just as well without him. It’s akin to Warren Buffet trying to pick sucessors. WB is a fantasic stock picker - he may not be a great sucessor picker though.
Warren Buffett would be the first to mention winning the ovarian lottery (being born in the US) and winning the coin flip challenge. The latter being if you had a coin toss competition with thousands of people in the tourney, 1 will end up winning. You cannot claim that the winner is a coin toss expert.