Goodbye Steve Jobs
Friday, October 7, 2011 at 08:32PM I was taking a tutorial with the First Year this morning and I was talking about how difficult it is to make something that is easy to use. When you try to add a feature to make things “easier” for the user you often find that you have made your life as an engineer much more difficult. And then I thought of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday. He was legendary for giving his engineers hell. When they thought something was “good enough” he would refuse to accept it, repeatedly rejecting solutions that other companies would have shipped as “good enough”. He ended up with products that were truly delightful to use, and by starting with the person and making the technology fit, rather than vice-versa he moved things on into new places time and time again. And his engineers loved him for it, because he got them to make things that they never believed they could. We will not see his like again.
If you want to read about the way he drove Apple to make the Macintosh and get a feel for the way he worked in those early days, I can recommend West of Eden.
Life
Reader Comments (1)
I worked for a number of years for Hewlett Packard back when they still made test and measurement equipment. HP's objective was just as hardheaded as any other corporation, they wanted to make a profit, but the way they went about it was by making excellent products. Internally it had a name, next bench engineering, which meant that engineers were expected to create products that the engineer sitting at the next bench would think is cool. It was a fantastic environment to work in and from all reports Steve Jobs and his original partner Steve Wozniak loved working there too.
These days it seems Apple has taken up that torch. Steve Jobs once said, "We just can't ship junk...it's not who we are" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu0qeb_rJYU. He proved definitively that it is possible to make both a profit and excellent consumer products.
He was also a visionary. That word gets tossed around a lot but as proof I offer this video of him in a Q&A session at WWDC shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3LEXae1j6EY. At about 1:03 he's answering a question about the Newton and describes what is basically a modern iPhone 10 years before it was introduced. He knew exactly what he wanted way before it existed. The world would have been a different place today without him and I do wonder how different it would have been in 10 years time if he hadn't died.