Comment by spider-mario
4 hours ago
Doesn’t that understate it? Isn’t a sales guy still important, to figure out what to build and to actually get it in the hands of users? Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make, and the engineers just so happened to make it?
I think the previous poster is wrong. In typical understanding of industry roles, a ‘sales guy’ doesn’t typically work hands-on with product development. Some variations of ‘marketing’ roles do indeed work on developing new products, so this might be less inaccurate.
But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.
The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.
Two notable instances:
- first iPod prototype --- Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium and when bubbles rose up noted, "there's space inside, it can be smaller". https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-threw-ipod-protot...
- iDVD --- he drew a button on a whiteboard and announced, "Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make." https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/how-steve-jobs-1-design-...
I'd like to think that the current behaviour of the Apple Font pallet where when collapsed into a single bar grew out of a suggestion made after discussions on comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- but he was justifiably proud when he showed it off to one visitor (per a link I can no longer find, or which is no longer up, or behind a paywall)
> Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make
This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.
Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.
The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.
> the engineers just so happened to make it?
Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.
You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.
To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.