Steve Jobs "never had any designs. He has not designed a single project"
Steve may not design the product, but he is the hard-grain sandpaper that gets a design from prototype to best in market.
Ars says it best:
"On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that's not his superpower . .. He is Apple's übercritic: one man to pare a torrent of creativity and expertise down to a handful of truly great products by picking apart every prototype, challenging every idea, and finding the flaws that no one else can see."
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a...
Further reading on this process in action - Steve's take on the Segway design:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/07/behind-the-scenes-ste...
The fact is, the Macintosh was nowhere near completion when Jobs took it over and shepherded it there himself. The whole Raskin/Jobs controversy smells like 30 year old corporate politics, nothing deeper than that.
Some potentially relevant folklore.org bits: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
Wozniak's all-planet engineering skill and user empathy is the cornerstone of everything that came afterward. To this day I cannot understand why the prototypical managerial leech that is Jobs, however good his taste, is venerated over Woz. By technical folk, of all people.
FWIW, Paul Lutus is calling this accurate over on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daabf/steve_job...
Woz' interview in Founders At Work seems to confirm that Jobs played a major part in many design decisions on the initial Macintosh, especially the removal of extension slots:
We had a real argument over slots. (...) Steve said, "All people really need is a printer and a modem." And that was just false because he'd come from a different world than I. (...) He wanted just one slot for a printer and one for a modem(...), so I said, "If you want 2 slots, get another computer." That was the only time we had a real argument.
It would seem his opinion only got worse with time:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an...
His mid-90s annotations retract things he thought politic to say in the 80s.
At the end of the article it was revealed that that Raskin quote was made 24 years ago. Whether it was true then or not, it's certainly possible that Jobs has designed, or contributed to the design, of something at Apple in the 24 years since. Just a wee bit of a possibility there.
“[..] The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.
Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve's design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.”
via: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
Title is hardly a surprise. What did you expect? Will we next learn he never implemented a single NS_* class?
"He has not designed a single project" is a bit of a strawman argument. What Jobs does is focus a team of designers and engineers on creating a product that is really satisfying to use. It doesn't sound like much, but if it's easy, how come no company but Apple seems to be able to do it?
Anyway here is a Mac application that applies some of Jef Raskin's ideas to a finder alternative: http://www.raskinformac.com/
folklore.org paints a pretty interesting picture of Jef Raskin, and one which indicates his words should be carefully weighted and not taken at any more face value than those of Jobs.
For instance:
> Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point.
folklore also shows Jobs's contribution very differently than Raskin's own take:
> The plan of record for the Macintosh industrial design was still the one conceived by Jef Raskin, which chose a horizontally oriented, lunch-box type shape, with the keyboard folding up into the lid of the computer for easy transportability, kind of like the Osborne I, which we weren't aware of at the time. But Steve had a real passion for industrial design, and he never seriously considered following Jef's recommendations.
As well as complete and utter disagreement with what was apparently written by Raskin, behold from ZeroGravitas's link:
> The elimination of slots had been dictated by Jobs, however I thought this would hamstring the product. Thus I invented the all-important bus diagnostic port discussed below
Whereas on folklore.org:
> But Jef Raskin had a very different point of view. He thought that slots were inherently complex, and were one of the obstacles holding back personal computers from reaching a wider audience. He thought that hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn't rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware. His Macintosh vision had Apple cranking out millions of identical, easy to use, low cost appliance computers and since hardware expandability would add significant cost and complexity it was therefore avoided.
> Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports.
> Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much.
> Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.
Steve Jobs having nothing to do with the original Macintosh doesn't imply that Steve Jobs' aesthetic sense didn't result in Apple's resurgence.
It might imply that Jobs is not a nice guy but I think even a lot of Apple fans are OK with Jobs being a not-nice-guy-who-gives-them the coolest stuff.
I am personally distributed by the cult-like-climate that Apple is described as having but I am also appreciate that Apple is seen as where the best UIs appear.
I think having single persons aesthetic control is very important to and we should think about why.
My suspicion is that one wouldn't necessarily have to have genius to do this, just a willingness not to accept the usual croft that infects just any large engineering project. Any average user off the street can walk and say "I don't want to do that in five steps, I want to do it in one". The only genius it take here is a willingness to keep attitude even though a team of twenty spent a year deciding that five steps made sense (and their terrible decision happen because the logic of engineering process crept slowly and insidiously into their aesthetic, their idea of what is "OK").
The Mac was an improved version of the Lisa, which was a copy of the Xerox Alto, which was inspired by Englebart's NLS.
You can see what it would have been had Raskin carried out his plans, because he did, to something called the Canon Cat: http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m
Raskin has a better claim to the iOS design, in that it is an "incredible morphing computer".
Steve is the 'brave general' that sparked Apple, destroyed it, and rebuilt it again. He may have been a sociopath artist in his 20's but he grew up to be the world's greatest CEO in his 40's and 50's. Just look at the Apple 10 years ago and look at them now.
undefined
Steve jobs need not do it. He provides the vision, his engineers design his vision into a product and he sells it . period.
regardless of the truth it appears it's never too late to change and get better at what we do.
Well, guess what. He finally had success, regardless of what happened decades ago. ;)