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points by mvkel 4 days ago | 0 comments

> By 1991 only 50,000 NeXTcubes had been sold. One of these, however, was used by Tim Berners Lee to create the first web browser and server.

Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

[–] TheOtherHobbes 3 days ago

He's responsible for the iPhone, and effortless touch screen pocket computing has been culturally and psychologically catastrophic.

That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.

But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.

[–] trop 3 days ago

There's a band called Stoney Spring which has a somewhat caustic 2013 song "Jobs" which touches on this. Excerpts:

  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For what he's done to our bodies and our brains
  I blame you and me for making Steve Jobs feel like what he done was right
  
  ...
  
  And I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For turning rock-and-roll into a store at the mall
  I blame you and me for accepting the seduction
  Of being normal
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For driving a spike through the heart of the public space
  I blame you and me
  For retreating into fantasy, fingering our half-formed thoughts
  In our sleek sexy crumbling civilization
  
  ...
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For making us timid and effete
  I blame you and me
  For paying Steve Jobs to turn those sins into a lifestyle
  
  And a product
  And an industry
  And an identity
  A badge of honor
  
  ...

[–] Sir_Twist 3 days ago

If Apple didn't make the iPhone, wouldn't someone else have? I feel like the iPhone is a natural progression from what came before it (cell phones, PDAs, mp3 players, and other, more niche varieties of pocket devices). I feel like the iPhone isn't some blip on the technological timeline that wouldn't have happened otherwise. It just so happened that, by whatever factors were at play, Jobs was in the right place at the right time.

[–] butlike 18 hours ago

Sure. If it wasn't the NeXTcube it would have been something else. The creation of WWW is independent of Steve Jobs.

[–] vee-kay 4 days ago

The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers.

Thus the FPS genre in gaming was pioneered on these pioneering machines.

Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system. Sun Microsystems partnered with NeXT, for the NeXTSTEP Solaris but lost interest, but it later created Java as a direct competitor to NeXTSTEP.

Apple used NeXT's software technologies as the foundation for Rhapsody, Mac OS X (later macOS), and the operating systems that followed.

[–] mentos 3 days ago

I believe Jensen Huang said Doom was the game that launched NVIDIA?

So NeXT -> Doom -> Nvidia -> AI

[–] MrDOS 3 days ago

Doubtful. Doom was fully software-rendered. Quake, maybe?

[–] thewileyone 3 days ago

There was also 3DFX that led the way, before NVIDIA, with their Voodoo cards. The night and day difference of gaming on a Trident card vs a Voodoo card made grown men cry.

[–] bigstrat2003 4 days ago

> Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

Yes, very easily. He didn't actually make anything, he was a sales guy. It was the engineers who worked around him (Woz in the Apple days, others after) who deserve credit, not Jobs himself.

[–] spider-mario 4 days 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?

[–] lapcat 3 days ago

> 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.

[–] diskzero 3 days ago

I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them. I loved BeOS; I helped make it! But it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped. The NeXT team was very good, the code was much more mature and comprehensive and much less work needed to be done to mold it into OSX. Many of the key Be people ended up at Apple over time.

[–] lapcat 3 days ago

> I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them.

The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

> OSX would certainly never have shipped.

If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

[–] diskzero 3 days ago

> The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

Well, honestly, in hindsight, let me correct to 10000x! But seriously, this is a discussion about a historical event, and that is what my comment expressed.

> If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

I don't really understand this comment. I mean, Be actually ended up being worth about 11 million as a result (the Palm acquisition). Apple, meaning Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock and the other business and technical people who met with us at Be, and our counterparts at NeXT, had to to an analysis and predict the future as to which technology would replace the current Macintosh OS and eliminate the failing Taligent, Pink and whatever else efforts were going on. And even then it wasn't easy; there was infighting between the Apple teams and the NeXT teams that didn't get resolved until Steve came out of limbo during the 18 months he was acting as a advisor to Gil Amelio.

What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen, but a combination of JLG, the Be board and shareholders and Steve made that not happen. Instead, Be went into making internet appliances, audio hardware and the company and its stock price slid into decline. Be did get one additional windfall of 23 million in 2003 which was the result of lawsuit settlement, so I guess the overall company value ended up being 34 million.

Most of us would have preferred to work with the NeXT people at Apple and convert our Be shares into Apple shares, instead of seeing the stock price fall and the code become irrelevant.

[–] lapcat 3 days ago

> I don't really understand this comment.

I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:

"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"

"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"

"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"

If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.

And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?

I wasn't aware of this:

> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen

What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

[–] WillAdams 3 days ago

BeOS was also hampered by promising more than they delivered --- I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS user's group meeting when I asked how the presenter's slides were printed (at that time, BeOS didn't have printer drivers, a marked contrast to NeXT's use of PostScript for both display and printing and even having a rasterizer which had them adding a clause in later OS versions limiting the DPI for output --- folks were buying NeXT computers and using them to drive imagesetters, bypassing the normal PS license expense).

[–] diskzero 3 days ago

Oh wow, I wish I was in that meeting to see that. You are completely correct about the printer drivers and so many other elements of BeOS. BeOS was very incomplete and very shallow. I also shiver to think about what would have happened when the kernel and driver code was audited. It would be a very interesting experiment to get ahold of the leaked BeOS 4 source code and use a LLM to compare the driver code against the Linux source code of the same era.

[–] mft_ 4 days ago

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.

[–] WillAdams 3 days ago

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)

[–] diskzero 3 days ago

Cool observations and he said and did similar things in pretty much every meeting or demonstration we did in the UX team when I was at Apple. I only wish we had more of those and less of the nasty comments and personal abuse he was so good at dishing out. We also got a lot of that every meeting too.

[–] diskzero 3 days ago

He was a sales guy, a charismatic visionary, an abusive cult leader, a passionate motivator, a single-minded steam roller, an obsessive product manager, an introspective thinker, a borderline sociopath, a company builder, an insightful analyzer of design, music, pop culture, architecture, fashion and more. He was deeply flawed, but definitely more than only a “sales guy”.