You would think, but 9/10 people making comments about Steve Jobs on the internet describe him as only a savvy marketeer and business man. Steve didn't invent anything, doesn't know how to program bla bla, is how it goes. While Steve Jobs was an asshole in many ways this is a gross injustice to his legacy. He clearly had a lot of input and influence on Apple products and was important in making them good.
But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of products to take this view.
I think the influence was a high level of systems thinking. He didn't just design products, he designed what you could do with products, and he designed how and why people would want them - which is a level of insight that eludes anyone who thinks a product is a list of features or (worse) a technology stack.
Having said that, iMovie was good, iPhoto was okay-to-good, but iTunes has always been awful.
I've never understood why it was so badly designed. (And it's getting worse, by all accounts.)
iTunes is certainly awful to use, but the interesting part of that story is not iTunes itself, but the work and negotiation that had to happen to license music from all the major labels to populate the iTunes marketplace. Sony had a huge first-mover advantage in that space (their own global music label, movie studio, video game console AND the Walkman brand), but was too busy forcing its disparate businesses to compete against each other.
The end result being that they completely missed the boat on the then-nascent digital music market, and less than 15 years later, have spun off most of those brands and hardware-wise, Playstation aside, are limited to making (very nice) camera sensors for iPhones.
My favorite play was when he flew his private jet to the UK to bribe the man he stole the ipod design from to testify in court that he(Steve) did NOT steal the idea from Sony. Good stuff.
So did Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergiy Brin, Jerry Yang etc. (steve case, fecesbook, myspace and other shitty cut-n-paste non-algorithmic efforts were underway many knew how to cut and paste myspace text entry boxes to spy on girls and call users "dumb fucks" in the AOL/Iomega space).
Yes, I could write a whole book on the details of each person I work closely with. There's always lessons in subtle things they occasionally do/say, that nevertheless have significant impacts. This article is... nice but fluff.
Example: "As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us. He was basically the Product Manager for all of the products I worked on, even though there eventually were other people with that title, who usually weren't allowed in the room :)"
Self-contradictory. He made himself de facto Product Manager — more powerful actually, since other Product Managers "usually weren't allowed in the room". Virtually by definition, the top boss is whatever manager they decide to be.
(Did the author ever analyze the power relations in each meeting? Would the boss even tolerate someone who was too good at it?)
But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of products to take this view.