Comment by tooltalk
8 years ago
Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did.
It seems like based on that vague description, John wasn't necessarily arguing against his own interest and Apple engineers might have had to consider constraints that neither Steve or John was familiar with. Take for instance Steve's response to John's disliking for the iMac mouse -- in this case, Steve quoted "every study" that there were usability issues with first-time users. But on the topics of OpenGL security, his trigger word, it seems, was "ideal."
> Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did.
I'm going to assume you meant "didn't". My point is that he didn't have to. Decision makers rarely have an expert understanding of what they're deciding on, but that's ok, because their value in the process is making a decision. For the most part I'd go so far as to argue that it doesn't even matter that they make the right decision, just that they make a decision.
Look at the Linux Desktop, my favorite whipping boy. How many different implementations are there of pretty much every layer of that monstrously fragmented beast? Is this because everyone who made these things is stupid? Probably not, they just all have (sometimes vastly) different opinions on how things should be. If, in the early days of the Linux Desktop, someone had been able to say "this is the way it will be done, end of discussion"* and have people listen we might have a stable and consistent free desktop os today. What if all the effort that was spent endlessly reinventing the wheel had instead been spent on a singular vision? It would still have its warts and quirks sure, because sometimes bad decisions would get made, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a damn sight better than what we have now.
*Some will argue that the value in the Linux Desktop is precisely because no one can do this. They're not wrong, they just shouldn't be surprised that most other people want something different from their desktop os.