My interest tends to be less with the great leaders-who are inevitably well-covered by smarter people than me-but the people in their orbit whose ideas become manifest in the hands of people like Jobs… or whose ideas don't, and become something of an alternate history. "Steve Jobs Is Dead, and So Is My Dad: Two Very Different Silicon Valley Stories." It's always interesting when childhood fiddling intersects with adult innovation, as with Marvin Minsky and Tinkertoys. Jobs's obsession with clean physical design makes a lot more sense now. “It gave a tremendous sense of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment,” he told the Smithsonian interviewer. From neighbors who worked in the electronics firm in the Valley, he learned about that field - and also understood that things like television sets were not magical things that just showed up in one’s house, but designed objects that human beings had painstakingly created.
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Meanwhile, his dad, Paul - a machinist who had never completed high school - had set aside a section of his workbench for Steve, and taught him how to build things, disassemble them, and put them together. I didn't know until I read Steven Levy's obituary that, though he grew up in the heart of what was to become Silicon Valley, Jobs's dad was a machinist: So I understand the emotional attachment.Ģ. Even setting aside Apple's brilliant marketing, once you get down to these questions you get into how people understand the world and interact with it. Which is an entirely legitimate argument. Which, if you worked there, you might find stupid, just as you might think Apple's control over its products compares unfavorably to Microsoft's benign neglect of XBox Kinect hacking and the wonderful, promising fun people are having with that. It reminds me of Mies van der Rohe's specification that the window shades in the Seagram Building only operate in three positions.
Steve believed that if you opened the system up people would start to make little changes and those changes would be compromises in the experience and he would not be able to deliver the kind of experience that he wanted. Sculley's tenure as CEO was brief and he was self-admittedly a terrible fit, but he's extremely thoughtful and articulate about Jobs and the company: The best articulation of Apple's-and Jobs's-philosophy that I've read, and how that expressed itself in its products, actually comes from former Apple CEO John Sculley, speaking with Cult of Mac. Only a minority of people use Apple products, but only a minority of people work or live in Mies van der Rohe buildings. To say Apple products are just "stuff" is like saying buildings are just stuff. Apple products have their own design logic, both in terms of how they look and function: a particular way of interacting with users, and in turn how those users interact with information. This is the one counter I can think of to the "it's just stuff" argument (which, as someone who didn't own an Apple device until his late 20s, and that just a refurbished nano-worth noting that Apple became one of the biggest companies in the world only after their prices dropped-I'm not unsympathetic to). I don't have a lot to say about the passing of Steve Jobs, but a couple things caught my eye:
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