Is it an indication of Steve Jobs’ (in)famous strive for perfection, or just stupid bone-headedness? The white variant of the iPhone 4 was first delayed for a few weeks, but those few weeks became ‘end of the year’. Now we know why: the manufacturers Apple employs are apparently having issues matching the shades of white of the various components. This anecdote ties in nicely with a very interesting interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs’ ways of doing business.
John Sculley is not an entirely uncontroversial figure in Apple’s history. The former and very successful PepsiCo president joined Apple as CEO in 1983. While he nearly ran the company into the ground, he also increased sales from 800 million per year to 8 billion per year. However, Apple had become an organisational mess, with boatloads of projects that would never yield any marketable results, but would still get funding. In the meantime, real issues like MacOS being an unstable mess were never addressed.
More importantly, Sculley’s management style clashed with that of Steve Jobs, causing Jobs to eventually be cast out of the company. We know what happened then – Jobs founded NEXT, which made awesome innovative products but eventually failed in the marketplace due to curious design decisions, such as the prohibitively expensive and unreliable magneto-optical drive it used for storage. Only 50000 NeXT computers were sold, but who cares – it’s the company’s software that mattered, software containing innovations we still rely on every single day.
In an interview with Cult of Mac, John Sculley details his time at Apple in quite some detail and dripping with honesty – admitting his mistakes along the way. His description of Steve Jobs is pretty much what you’d expect. “He was a person of huge vision,” Sculley notes, “But he was also a person that believed in the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about everything – a perfectionist to the end.”
Such a perfectionist, in fact, that Apple HQ is sitting on a pile of white iPhone 4s, without actually shipping them out to customers. The reason? The company that manufactures the white faceplate and the company that produces the home button can’t get their colours properly aligned. The whites aren’t exactly the same. That’s it. Boom, multi-million dollar profit machine won’t ship because the whites aren’t exactly the same. What do you mean, Steve’s a perfectionist?
The Sculley interview contains – among other things – another gem: Steve Jobs was in love with Sony. Sony’s products, Sony’s factories, the clothes the workers wore, everything – Jobs loved it. Sony’s CEO gave Sculley and Jobs the first Walkman and tours of the factories that made them, and all this impressed Jobs a great deal.
“We used to go visit Akio Morita and he had really the same kind of high-end standards that Steve did and respect for beautiful products,” Sculley recalls, “I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of the first Sony Walkmans. None of us had ever seen anything like that before because there had never been a product like that. This is 25 years ago and Steve was fascinated by it. The first thing he did with his was take it apart and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done, how it was built.”
The Macintosh factories were modelled after Sony’s factories. “Steve’s point of reference was Sony at the time. He really wanted to be Sony. He didn’t want to be IBM. He didn’t want to be Microsoft. He wanted to be Sony,” Sculley adds.
You can say what you want about Apple, but at this point, Jobs’ perfectionism is paying off. The company is doing better than ever, selling insane amounts of products at even crazier profit margins. Even if it means you’re not getting your white iPhone 4.
Link to the Sculley interview is down.
“Shades of white”
There’s your problem
Meanwhile, the shareholders turned a whiter shade of pale.
Edited 2010-10-15 21:35 UTC
The Apple share holders must be happy:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=
It don’t seem to care much about negative world views:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=
At the worlds collapse everyone will be twittering it on their iPhones?!
Now Sony want to be Apple.
I wonder how can he hold up shipment of the iPhone because of color mismatches, yet not only ship but *design* them with antennas that are in electrical contact with the user’s body…
I won’t deny he’s doing something right, and his company is a refreshing break from the cheap commodity mentality that is consumer electronics (and at least somewhat justifies the price premium), but I guess his meticulous, visionary attention to detail only comes into play in areas he has expertise in.
This was an embarrassment to be sure, but it really is blown all out of proportion… The problem does not occur with a bumper case (or any other case for that matter), and even without one it doesn’t occur unless you hold the device a certain way. And on top of that it only matters under certain conditions (you are in an area with poor reception in the first place).
Can it actually affect users? Sure, but it is going to be statistically infrequent. Imo the media latched on to it because reporting that Apple screwed something so trivial up in a product release was something they rarely got the opportunity to do.
That is what the media does – I’m certainly not whining about it, hell its just how human nature works – Apple had built up a reputation of being “Little Miss Perfect” (probably undeservedly, but that was the media image of them none-the-less) and everyone likes taken someone like that down a notch when the opportunity arises.
My only point is in hindsight it really wasn’t a big deal, a minor hick-up at worst. Apple has had FAR worse problems in other products…
You’re probably right that it was blown out of proportion but I think what really allowed this grassfire to explode in something worse is that Apple simply made up excuses and denied the issue even existed, when it clearly was present. It was the arrogence of their response.
I would have thought Apple would know to not try and fight the press.
I think the real embarrassment was how Apple denied that it was even a problem, in the first place. They care more about industrial design than they do about basic utility. Remember the Cube servers that didn’t have a fan that essentially turned into molten blocks? Niiice.
It only happens in certain situations; I’d put money on it the issue was raised but the conclusion was that the number of people who would handle the phone like a gorilla would be few in number. Something Steve needs to understand, there are a lot of gorillas out there who like man handling everything they touch.
Apple wasn’t the only one who did this; years ago before the debasement of technology as a race to the bottom there were companies who would spend time on fit and finish. Companies who realised that yes, having a fast computer is great but what about the feel of the computer and the operating system, the way in which expansions were designed and fit into the main computer.
The problem is we have people on this very forum who want NZ$700 computers but then whine when it doesn’t operate like a NZ$2300 MacBook Pro or a Sony Vaio. You get what you’re willing to pay for – there is a price you pay if you want something that is above the ‘race to the bottom’ quality that Dell, Acer, Toshiba and HP/Compaq have indulged in. But even with Sony they’re at the mercy of Microsoft, where Microsoft’s quality fortunes go so will theirs.
I’ve always been a fan of the vertically integrated model where the computer vendor owns the operating system itself. I’ve stated several times that if a big OEM embraced *BSD, built a great GUI and framework on top, created a set of home grown applications in house to bundle with the computer, got third parties on board with a great set of development tools, they would be able to carve out a niche where they can keep all the value in house rather than losing 1/3 of it to Microsoft each time a computer is shipped.
In my opinion, this feeling that engineering both hardware and software makes the product better is totally wrong in the case of desktop/laptop. I rather see it as an error : when people dislike Mac hardware, they ditch Mac software as well, while the latter is arguably much more well-done. It’s just a profit loss.
There’s really nothing wrong with computer hardware nowadays (well, except the overheating Acers), except if you want something *really* exotic and useless like a touchscreen to be duck-taped on it.
The sole thing that goes currently wrong in the PC market is that after both HW and SW are manufactured, HW manufacturers are in charge of putting those together and put loads of crap in software. For this to change, the OS manufacturer must be very clear : installing anything but drivers voids the hw manufacturer’s right of selling the OS. They make hardware, software is not their realm.
Most of the other problems we have with our computers daily rather come from OS legacy, poor OS design decisions, and bad OS-software vendor interaction. It’s this, in my opinion, that needs to be fixed… And it’s the realm of software, not hardware.
Edited 2010-10-16 06:33 UTC
I beg to differ.
Have a look at smartphones (they’ve become somehow the equivalent of the PC’s of the 19xx in the 20xx era). Put something new like a compass in a phone and *poof* – new innovative software is written to the benefit of end users.
It’s more difficult to get end user innovations without a vertical model i. e. a clear vision of a feature that consists of HW to support it and software to use it.
HW vendors have no real incentive for innovation without software vendors (which means primarily Microsoft) supporting new features properly.
I even think that the PC industry somewhat (not entirely) relies on vertical integrated vendors such as Apple as a driver or accelerator for progress (others like the game industry influence HW performance). We’ve all seen what happened to the adoption of things like USB, web cams or DVI out on laptops, etc. when vendors such as Apple start to push such technologies. It doesn’t mean that Apple always succeeds (think FireWire), but it’s one major first step for certain HW to gain traction.
The phone market is different from the PC market. There are a lot of possible HW/SW combinations, and no standard has emerged (and hopefully none will ever will, since phones answer much more varied use cases than computer so a single hardware would be a very bad idea)
I see no fundamental difference between the PC and the Phone. Just because the speed of change in the (more mature) PC HW market is slower doesn’t mean we have to stick to PS2 and be thankful for it.
??
Up till now I thought PCs were the versatile ‘everything is possible’ machines while phones are primarily phones and as such, they are restricted to mobile use, i. e. have limits when it comes to size, power usage, etc. You can use your PC as a phone – you can’t use your phone with a 30” monitor, scanner, printer, blu-ray drive, ..
Of course, but on a mature market like PC hardware, you don’t expect to see people breaking things everyday in an attempt to make something new, like in the Linux desktop or in the smartphone market. Customer needs have moved towards stabilization and only gradual improvements (faster processing and networking, cheaper devices, a wider range of screen sizes, better battery life).
Actually, I think it’s a good thing. Computers have become tools used at work. As such, they need to have the stability of a tool. People don’t want added features in screw drivers and drills everyday, they want something cheap and working properly.
No sure if I made myself clear enough.
That is a long gone dream. Since that thought was widespread, people have discovered (again) that “one size fits all” is fundamentally a bad idea.
A lcd screen, no matter how well-engineered, is not good for reading books. It’s better to have a dedicated device with a e-ink or pixelQi screen. Fundamentally, PCs are also too big to answer some user needs (take texting as an example : if I need to communicate something to somebody quickly in the middle of a crowded train, I just can’t put my laptop out of my bag, and using it… well… don’t even think of it).
Today, PCs have settled on a range of needs :
-Office work (Worxelpoint)
-Heavy web browsing and communication (when you have a lot of time to spend)
-Heavy data acquisition (from a peripheral)
-Number crunching, data analysis
-Multimedia content creation
-High-end entertainment (high-quality games, watching movies when you don’t have a TV)
-Programming
That’s more or less it. So until holographic displays and telepathic communication are here… We more or less have everything we need to do that on the average computer. With their nice general-purpose hardware, PCs are more or less skilled in an area or another, you just choose one depending on your needs.
Phones are another story. There is a world between a Nokia N900 and Sagem’s “just to talk” mobile phones. Phones generally only target communication, light entertainment and content consumption, but because of their small size and low price they can’t even target all of that. They are fundamentally specialized devices. You can, as an example, see the following software/hardware combinations on the phone market :
-Basic phone (extremely good for voice call and light texting, but nothing else. Dying breed)
-Average guy’s phone (like the basic phone, but with some added multimedia and light entertainment features at the cost of battery life and build quality)
-Keyboard phone (has a full azerty keyboard and often a decent mail client. Allows much better written communication than the ones above, but worse portability. Either quite expensive and packed with a lot of features, or a variant of the average guy’s phone with crappier build quality and battery life)
-Overpriced toy (come with a touchscreen and very expensive. Completely ditch communication in favor of better web browsing and heavier entertainment, close to a portable video game console and a good DAP. Pretend to be able to do everything because the API is disclosed, in practice not so much except if you like farts)
Edited 2010-10-17 20:38 UTC
What a complete bullshit. I wanted to say this even to the post above.
I’ve got a Macbook Pro, and it suck. End of story.
Sure laptops in general probably suck much more than desktops, and even more so than workstations. I’d still assume an IBM Thinkpad would had been much better.
And atleast I definitely didn’t got what I paid for. How the fuck can someone say that about any Apple product? Unless you think “paying for brand” matters.
isn’t that exactly what Apple has done?
kaiwai, this is terminally confused about the way the PC market and industry is.
All PC vendors are packaging from a small range of standard components. You have three or four hard drive makers, all of whose products connect to other components identically. You have two graphics card vendors. Half a dozen main board suppliers, and only two processor vendors. Memory, there is more, but one memory chip is also exactly like another in terms of connectivity.
The only differentiation in the OS between Apple, Windows and Linux is Apple’s attempts to restrict what their OS will install on. Otherwise, in how it relates to hardware, there is no difference. There could not be, if you think about it, because the hardware is identical. There is no more difference between a given Mac and a given Dell in terms of hardware than there is between two different Dells or a Dell and an HP. They are using slightly different selections from the same set of hardware components.
The cases are very different. But I don’t suppose even the most fanatical Apple adherents maintain that what really makes the famous Apple quality is integration between the OS and the case?
This whole thing is a complete nonsense. What we have here is an OS which is slightly different but no better than the alternatives, being deliberately crippled in terms of what it can run on, and then used as the differentiator in a designer brand.
Its all about branding. It has nothing to do with engineering or design or integration or the rest of this stuff. It belongs to the history of marketing, not design or engineering. One has to say that as such, its brilliant. But that is all it is.
Strange. There is e. g. a huge difference in HW usability, though. I’ve never seen a Dell having something like target disk mode. Do HPs come with EFI? Why has DVI output been a standard on even the cheapest Mac laptops for years while HP’s still used VGA, etc. etc.
I see Apple’s HW design choices (and yes: even if the number of suppliers of components is limited, there’s still such a thing as a HW design) less a restriction than a set of choices that affects their software. It’s part of the platform they build on. E. g. iChat (AV) is a SW that directly relies on the availability of a cam on every Apple laptop. Even something trivial as sound output – I’ve never had a Mac with lousy sound output while the HP I have to use at work – even though it has a distinct sound card – has horrible sound quality.
Do you want to know why HP even bothered to put a sound chip in the PC? Easy – there are still way to much idiots that think a spec sheet tells the whole story. And that’s why some people come to the wrong conclusion that it doesn’t matter if you buy HP, Dell, Apple, IBM or whatever.
However, consumer thinks otherwise ..
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/macbook-laptops-consumer-reports,7…
What’s that ?
I don’t know about HP, but my Asus laptop has EFI (just set up to bios emulation as a default setting, for obvious reasons).
Because DVI is highly overrated
No, seriously, as of today, screen connectivity is moving towards HDMI (which is a good thing since it finally unifies TV and computer connectivity). Most laptops come with HDMI connectivity built-in nowadays, except those from Apple (or have they changed their mind recently ?)
Not sure of that. On a mature market like the laptop one, the configuration is now more or less standard : a keyboard, a screen, a webcam, speakers, minijack sound I/O, USB, wi-fi g+, legacy and HDMI video output, eSata (I really don’t know why this one is so widespread now), and a CD drive. Bluetooth is not always there on lower-end models, don’t know why exactly since it probably doesn’t cost much.
So software does not have to support a wide range of configuration on the PC market, really…
Cam is more or less a standard features of laptops now, so this point is irrelevant. Moreover, what if I don’t like video calls ? How come I am forced to buy a webcam in the name of some random software which I will not use ?
Not sure what you’re complaining about : speakers or minijack output ?
If it’s speakers, well, it’s no secret that good speakers are expensive, especially when they are small (because they have to defy the laws of physics through careful equalization, and things like that).
But if I want a computer just for work, do I need top-notch sound quality just to annoy my coworkers ? No ! So again, HQ speakers should not be a mandatory part of laptops.
Indeed, spec sheets don’t tell enough. But good vendors make a selection between the available products, and look for at least some level of quality when they go mid- and high-end.
Myself, I’m a bit of an Asus and HP fan, because I have had a very good overall experience with their computers, and a bit of an Acer hater because I’ve never met an Acer computer which did thermal dissipation right and computer spontaneously turning off because of overheating should have been left to the Apple III era. But I do think that all computer vendors (except Acer) now more or less sell the same thing, once you leave the low-end market where quality hugely varies between one model and another. Choosing a computer is only a matter of knowing what kind of keyboard you want, if sound quality matters to you, if you want bluetooth…
See? That’s what I’m talking about. You may think that HW is just standardized interchangeable pieces with no engineering any more. But it’s how this HW is used to the benefit of the user!
(Target disk mode means you can boot any Mac in a ‘disk mode’ where it behaves like an external drive to other macs. Very useful in various circumstances e. g. when moving to new HW or in support situations)
And you are satisfied with the given? Engineering is not about selling the same piece of HW 1’000’000 times. It’s about pushing further. With the “it’s standard” attitude we would have been stuck with CP/M and 8bit CPUs.
I really like vendors that are able to disrupt the ‘standards’ market with new innovations – that do real HW engineering and not only throw together the cheapest ‘standards’ parts. That try to improve customer experience and not just brag with useless spec lists.
And why has it become a standard feature? (see my point now)
I talk about minijack output with heavy static crackles (I wanted the sound for not being distracted by co-workers talk. It doesn’t have to be top-notch, only usable. And why use an iPod if the box under the desk seems to have all necessary parts for that – but alas ..)
My point was: Selling a PC with a sound card that is not usable shows that even though things seem to be standardized, there are still differences between manufacturers. I’d rather buy a piece of HW from a company that does care about the fitness of the final product and not about specs lists.
Your horizon is too narrow for my taste.
Edited 2010-10-17 18:43 UTC
That’s just a crappy Mac workaround to replace an ability PC users have had for ages : take the HDD out of the computer with no skills and only a screw driver.
Yeah, I’m satisfied with the current PC market as far as hardware is concerned. Good enough for me, except for the weight/hardness (I’d love to see a computer as light and flexible as a sheet of paper) and those horrible LCD screens that just need to die and be replaced by OLED as quickly as possible.
My main gripes with computers nowadays are in software. Same for most people. There’s a lot to fix in there.
I think it’s that line of thinking that led that engineering failure that shiny LCD screens are to become so widespread. The will to make something new.
I wish it hadn’t. I dislike it when I have to buy things I don’t need together with things I need.
Edited 2010-10-17 20:40 UTC
Win.
No, lose. What the hell is a user with no skill supposed to do with an internal hard drive? Unless the user has a usb to ide/sata adaptor the hard drive is useless to them. Target disk mode allows for the user to use another mac to grab their files without having to do anything but boot their machine while holding “t”.
Doesn’t matter anyway as I don’t think target disk mode works with anything but Firewire, so those Macs without FW can’t use it as far as I know, I may be wrong.
Anyway, Sculley said something interesting in that interview. He said that Sony should have had the iPod. Sony was an innovative design force once. However as they got bigger, they lost the ability to turn on a dime. They couldn’t make an innovative product without stepping on some manager’s and his group’s toes. Instead Sony was taking trying to lock in users with things like the minidiscs and other proprietary formats. My guess is that content arm of Sony was getting in the way of the engineering arm. Since Jobs has final say on everything and he keeps his teams small, he can move far more quickly. Sony needs to go back to that formula though at this point its too late. The thing the Jobs admired the most, the manufacturing am of Sony has been outsourced like everything else. I guess Apple is in the same boat on that front.
A user with no skill would not know about the t key anyway. If the computer is broken, he handles it to a professional. That professional would then internally sigh “ah, crap, a mac”. If the computer works well enough that target disk mode is functional, he would have to keep two computers on his desk (and know about the t key too), and find that FireWire cable that he didn’t use for years somewher in a drawer. If the computer doesn’t work, which is the most probable case, he would still have to take the disk apart and put it in another computer. It would just be made more difficult by Apple.
On the other hand, have you ever heard about that PC thing called eSata ? You know, the ability to plug an internal HDD on your computer just as if it was an external HDD… That is, in my opinion, something which *actually* helps support.
Actually, I think Jobs has managed to be Sony in that respect. iTunes, appStore-only devices… This reminds me so much of SonicStage !
Though I must credit for Apple for one thing in that area : at least, in the intended use case, their software works. Whereas for sony, the fact that the product is artificially crippled after completion is clearly visible through something which fails miserably in the middle of an otherwise very good product.
Edited 2010-10-18 05:45 UTC
First off nice trolling. Second, anyone who is an audio/video professional will have plenty of firewire cables lying around as that is par for the course. 3rd as someone who has to support macs, just hitting t on a mac as opposed to opening it (which is easy to do on their laptops) is far easier than to hunt around for an even harder to find and more expensive SATA/IDE to usb cable. Your argument falls flat anyway because any professional, especially one who supports Macs, will have FW cables aplenty. If they don’t they have no business calling themselves a professional if they don’t have the necessary trade tools.
I’m talking about a guy whose job is to take care of computers. Let’s face it, except for AV professionals, FW is dead and has been for a long time.
Why bother ? Just plug the drive in another computer, that’s what that SATA connection is here for.
If something as simple as that feature works, in fact, you don’t even need another computer to repair the mac anyway. Just use a linux distro to copy data on an external HDD, then fix the problem, copy data back, and you’re done…
Disagree with that. Supporting legacy and specialized hardware is not the business of a computer support service. If I don’t manage to make my parallel port printer work and the help desk doesn’t have a computer working with that connectivity, would you blame the help desk for not supporting such an ancient thing ?
Edited 2010-10-18 17:29 UTC
*LOL*
Your wrong and you know it.
Fiddling with internal drives when you can just boot in target disk mode and attach the computers internal drives (yes: what if you have several of them – screw them all out?) is way superior. Macs had this as a standard feature in the 90’s already (when PC fanboys fiddled with crappy IDE drives) – it wasn’t limited to FW but worked just fine with SCSI.
And why bother with “professional support” when a user can fix things himself (and without a screwdriver). Especially if the “professional support” chap is of the arrogant sort and clearly has some mental shortcomings (probably from all the dust of those old boxes he had to opened just to get at the internal drive’s data).
LOL – Only Thom could count that ridiculous response as a ‘Win’ 😀
That’s just a crappy Mac workaround to replace an ability PC users have had for ages : take the HDD out of the computer with no skills and only a screw driver.
Sorry to butt in, but taking out the harddrive to troubleshoot? We Linux users have had the ability to boot a Live-CD on the affected machine for years and do what we need to do on the drive in place and copy stuff to an external USB drive if necessary.
Work around or not, the ability to mount a Mac as an external drive on another Mac sounds nifty. It sure beats disassembling the machine to get at the disk/data. Pulling apart a machine should be a last resort, not par of the course.
Target disk mode is a minor feature of the OS, its not because the hardware is any different. What it lets you do is boot from another PC’s hard drive, as if it were an external hard drive.
Its of limited interest to Windows or Linux installations since the hardware supported is much wider and one install cannot normally simply be transferred to another. You could go into terminal mode I suppose.
My point was not that hardware configurations are identical across manufacturers, they are not. My point was that there is as much difference between different HP systems as there is between an HP and a Mac. In short, this is not about diffences between populations, but about differences between individuals.
We can all argue about which particular sort of computer configuration we would like, but the fact is, there are no macs any more. There are generic x86 machines packaged together by Apple, HP, Dell Asus or whoever, which differ by choice of components. And that is the only difference. Its not design.
Well, except for the case. Now that really is design.
Despite my feelings towards Sony today I am a huge admirer of Mr. Akio Morita after I read his biography a few years ago and I think that these days there are few if any CEOs that are really comparable, Jobs himself included, so I think that it was wise to attempt to mimic his style.
Mr. Morita had, as stated on the interview, a legendary attention to details but, unlike Jobs, he was a very humble person – which seems to be an inherent virtue of many Japanese people, it seems – and willing to compromise to accommodate other people’s ideas, especially from engineers (Seriously, if you what you sell is a tech-based product, you definitely should listen to your engineers first and then look at the design people to see what they can do afterwards with what the engineers created/can create! It is common sense!) which is something that Jobs downright refuses to do for better or for worse.
But it is hard to fault Jobs today and Apple’s current performance in the market and its position as an industry trend setter are testaments to his leadership skills. But whatever… I still think that his products are way overpriced and that he is an elitist ass…
Edited 2010-10-15 22:53 UTC
I am a software engineer, and there have been many times we say we can only do something a certain way, but many times that is due to not wanting to redesign something in a different or better way, if it works, why change it. Being lazy is a big decision maker in our industry, just look at all the horrible software out there.
I am sure hardware is similar (though I have no experience in that area). If something is made a certain way and has always been made a certain way, then why redesign?
If you haven’t done so yet, check out the book iWoz, Woz explains how he would look at computer designs back in his youth and redesign them using way fewer parts. His design of the 5.25″ floppy drive is a brilliant example of that. I guess the time the two Steves spent together rubbed off on Jobs.
I think Jobs pushes his staff because more times than not because the people who say it can’t be done just don’t know that it actually can.
I have a lot of respect and admiration for Jobs, but I wouldn’t want to personally spend too much time with the guy, I think Woz would be way more interesting to hang out with.
I don’t know if I can speak for all engineers out there, but we love doing new, cutting-edge stuff. From my point of view, coding is boring and difficult (debugging takes a while, improving often leads to complete rewrites, golden ideas turn impredictably to mud when actually implemented) so I understand the “lazyness”; but for hardware… Which sane engineer would have resisted the idea of making a multi-touch gizmo like the iPhone? For all the engineers I know, the only thing restraining their creativity is financial means, not lazyness (or more accurately, the idea that “this is good enough, let’sz leave it like that”).
Actually, very good points. I love working on new and cutting edge stuff all the time, I was even writing file system drivers at one point (which was a lot of fun for the first few weeks). I feel alive when doing new stuff that hasn’t been done, or at least, I haven’t seen it 🙂 I love finding new ways to design things. A good example was working with completion ports to create a very efficient server. I had always approached servers in a very different manner.
What I was trying to say was, once you get your design done and it works and you are ready for a new project, having a boss like Jobs say that the design needs to be 10% faster or able to do x other things would be disheartening, esp. when you have been working 23 hours days to get it done and you think you have pushed it too it’s limits. Maybe it’s just me. I love finishing up a project and moving onto the next one.
I remember reading back when the Mac was first being created, the boot time was n seconds (I think close to a minute). Jobs wanted it to be 30 seconds or less. The team told him that was not going to happen, but he told them that’s what he wanted. They had to go back to the drawing board. They got the boot time to around 30 seconds by the way. I think if I was on that project, I would have been happy with one minute 🙂 I think most of the companies out there would have been happy with 1 minute. That is one of the differences.
A good tutor is often described as someone who can get his pupils to do or create things that they themselves never believed they had in them. I’m sure Mr. Jobs at times has demanded truly impossible things, but this drive for improving beyond what we think we are capable to achieve certainly has paid off, and without a doubt those on his select(*) design team will consider that a great inspiration to them all.
(*) – Yes, the design team is “select” in that it is a small core group, as was posted on OSNews a few days ago: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/you_can…
I think the difference that arises with Job’s approach is that by starting with a design and forcing engineers to come up with ways to implement it faithfully, he can often get results from the engineers that they initially thought were not possible… You tend to approach a problem differently when you know the end result is defined in stone (i.e. it has to work exactly like this) and no amount of arguing on your part is going to change it.
I’m not saying this is a better approach in all instances, but when it does lead to an engineering breakthrough it is usually partly responsible for the products success. For example, the “wheel” of the original iPod is often sited as the main point of differentiation between it and its competitors – and it worked remarkably well and took ages for competitors to create a decent knock-off. It also reportedly took Apple engineers ages to get right too… A compromise on that may have lead to a product quicker, it may even have been a good product, but it wasn’t the same product that was originally envisioned – and if an iPod used rocker buttons for navigation it wouldn’t have been much different from any other mp3 player…
As the article states, Apple doesn’t make a lot of products – their success partly relies on them being able to make a product that their competitors can’t duplicate easily – and if they do manage to duplicate it they can’t quite get it “right”. Imho that is directly attributable to the no-compromise-on-design approach they take.
It’s a cultural thing. Asia is very collectivistic, where as most of the western world is more individualistic.
The USA is hardly “most of the Western world” 🙂
Surprise, Australia and Europe are also individualistic societies.
Sweden didn’t used to be. Though maybe not to the extent of some others.
It’s starting to become though because the current leaders goes to election on that making it better for the people who perform and worse for the people who don’t will make people richer.
Surprise “individualistic” does not mean what you think it means.
I lived for a few years in Southern Europe, and I have worked for months at a time in Japan. In the big scheme of things, there were not as many social differences, esp. with regards to working hierarchy, methodologies and social support, as there seem to be with what I have experienced living in the USA.
Well I tend to adhere to the social psychological definitions of “individualism” and “collectivism” that Geert Hofstede has used since his authoritative book “Culture’s Consequences”, which was first issued in 1980. See his site: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/
Your personal discoveries actually confirm his findings. If you click on the countries in the left bar, you’ll actually see that Spain and Japan score about the same on the individualism (IDV) scale; Portugal and Greece scoring even lower (so they are more collectivist). Note, though, that Japan is in fact scoring twice above Asia’s average on individualism. So it’s no black-and-white situation here; it is safe to say that on average many Western countries are predominantly individualist, while many Eastern countries are predominantly collectivist, but there are other major cultural factors involved too.
Surprisingly though, Sweden scores quite high on individualism, but my country of the Netherlands is still one of the most individualized societies. Interestingly though, political forces have recently started trying to turn our culture into a so-called ‘civic society’ in which we voluntarily take on part of the responsibility to care for the needy in our direct (social) environment.
If you want to be more accurate, you can say that individualism is high primarily in Anglo-Saxon cultures.
I do absolutely agree. Akio Morita was one of the best CEOs in the history of the 20th century and I think Sony’s huge success in the 70ies, 80ies and 90ies was largely owed to his way of steering the company. It’s such a pity that Sony, once one of the greatest engineering companies in the world, has gone so much downwards ever since new CEOs have taken over the company. If Morita was still alive, he’d fire all of those amateurs.
I highly recommend the book by John Nathan, called “Sony”. It’s so much fun to read and one really learns to appreciate the achievements by Sony regarding electrical engineering, being a physicist who researches in physical electronics himself.
I also recommend watching this interview with Morita from the early 90ies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGcf_u3QCeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPXVNynO1U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYjrn_P8lSA
Adrian
Edited 2010-10-16 13:29 UTC
The “matching shades of white” was a common theory in a lot of podcasts (Mac OS Ken, MacBreak Weekly, TNT, TWiT, Engadget and probably others.) I don’t remember anyone claiming is was “fact” but I remember it being discussed as is it was.
EDIT – oh, and my point – this was a month ago.
Edited 2010-10-15 23:19 UTC
… honestly I really like Mr. Sculley, he seems to be a rather genuine and adult/rational person, which is refreshing given the current crop of CEOs. So it was a pleasure to get some honest opinions/hindsight from people who are/were “inside” the beast so to speak.
The comments section is what really frightens me, seriously Apple has some weirdly ill adjusted fans. Apple’s products are just a neat shell for a microprocessor board, not a philosophy which explains the meaning of life….
Well, the site is called Cult of Mac, what can you expect?
“That’s it. Boom, multi-million dollar profit machine won’t ship because the whites aren’t exactly the same.”
While the HPs and Motorolas of the world are driven by profit (I type this on a clunky HP laptop keyboard (yup, that’s how it’s been ever since I bought it)), Apple actually cares about what it’s delivering, and I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing. Besides, Apple isn’t the only organization that’s holding back it’s products until they are perfect; GNOME 3 comes to mind as an example right away. Quality over quantity is what makes them great. Sure we aren’t getting our white iPhones, but when we do, we’d be assured that they rock.
Yeah, if they sell 20-30% more of it because it looks great then who cares if it’s delayed?
Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 is a very comfortable keyboard with shitty quality.
The Unicomp keyboards are probably nice to. And with better quality.
The Razer Blackwidow is mechanical to.
You can probably get a Sun keyboard from Ebay to.
Almost as interesting as Dallas or Falcon Crest. What’s with this soap opera crap?
…then I really don’t want any of Apple’s shit.
I despise Sony with a passion since they overthrew Nintendo with the sssss*lll*ooooooo*wwww*llll*oooo*aaaa*dddd*iiii*nnnn*ggg PSX and turned gaming to mainstream shit in general (all of a sudden, it turned to mindlessly blowing shit up and the fun suddenly disappeared). Thankfully Microsoft came to the rescue to f*** it up even more by making dull and boring two-weapons-at-a-time first-person shooters the norm, which ended up influencing Duke Nukem Forever (which I’ve been anticipating since Duke Nukem 3D) in a bad way (yeah… nice… they took out the ability for Duke to haul around a complete arsenal of weapons. Nice way to turn a former badass into a pussy). And I’m not too crazy about Apple as a company either.
If Apple is striving to be like Sony, then I guess they’ve succeeded all these years… in keeping me away from their products. I have yet to buy an Apple product, despite how much OS X has tempted me. Primarily because of all of their restrictions on how you can use their software/hardware, and how just about every god damn program will need to be updated upon the release of a new OS version–or vice versa. And way back in the Mac OS 9/Win9x days, Windows blew Mac to hell and back.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about Sony though, since I bought a PS2 for a select few games (especially the Silent Hill series and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night). I have basically promised myself, though, that I *will not*, ever, buy a PS3. And I’m sticking to it.