Monday, November 14, 2011

Jobs

I just read an article on the New Yorker web site about Steve Jobs.

In addition to the quirks (to put it mildly) that he demonstrated, the article said that he had one key skill: he could see the improvements that something needed. He couldn't see them in the item itself, but when he was presented with alternatives to the item, he could pick out the alternative that would make it better. The article says that he wasn't a visionary who saw a better world and reshaped it; he was a tweaker who took the existing world and changed parts of it slightly until they reached perfection. Or at least whatever he thought perfection was at the moment he thought it. No bets on whether that changed over time.

An interesting thought. He couldn't create perfection himself, but he could demand it from others, and recognize it when they did. Working for him must have been both exhilarating and exhausting.

1 comment:

STAG said...

Funny. Though I have always had great respect for the man who drove macintosh, I never HAD Mac disease. The opposite in fact. Developed a distaste for Mac users since they were the uber virus makers and hackers fueled by their intense dislike of MS. Funny, nobody knows the founders of Norton or McAffee...the ones who made the internet possible.
I always wondered about the claim that MS stole the concept of windows from Mac. Absurd on the face of it...after all, if MS was to steal a product from Mac, why didnt they steal something that worked?
Anyway, Mr Jobs was an interesting man. I would not have wanted to work for him though I think I could have contributed a lot. Ideas are the lowest currency of the IT age. Jobs could select from a thouand, and pick the one which made money. He was driven, and when he was diagnosed with death staring him in the face he drove himself even harder! made him even MORE disrespectful of fools.
Nobody knew that man. I don't know I would have wanted to. Thank goodness he used his powers for niceness instead of evil.