[digi_owl]

And how many MBAs are "dreamers"? Then again, i don't think Jobs was much of a dreamer either, he was just damn good at talking the talk.

If anyone was a dreamer it was Woz back then. Dreaming of having his own computer, dreaming about computers improving life for everyone, etc etc etc.

Jobs are all about appearance. And not just visual. He had a near pathological loathing towards fan noise for example. To the point that one AppleII variant had problems with excessive heat buckling the logicboard and unseating components because he refused the engineers to install even the most unobtrusive of fans.

I suspect we can see this in how he was quite hung up on the GUI but completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.

[astrodust]

> Jobs are all about appearance.

Job was all about design, and design for him went from the very simple, raw components to the final packaging and marketing. For him there was no boundary between engineering and design, between software and hardware, they were all part of the same product.

It's easy to dismiss his views as superficial, but when he wanted to have a board look a certain way, or for a case to be a certain size, he'd press for it. When there were technical problems that prevented that from happening he wanted to understand why. He wanted explanations, and he'd listen to them, then make his own judgement based on that information.

> ...but completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.

The Macintosh famously shipped with very high speed serial ports for that time, up to 230Kbaud, which was vastly faster than any modem or other serial device around in the 1980s. Why?

LocalTalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocalTalk

Apple may not have had Ethernet in their early computers, but they were absolutely aware about the importance of networking. Sending files from one Mac to another was as simple as plugging them together. While the Macintosh didn't have a lot of games, it did have multi-player ones over a local network long, long before Windows did.

[ksec]

>Job was all about design, and design for him went from the very simple, raw components to the final packaging and marketing. For him there was no boundary between engineering and design, between software and hardware, they were all part of the same product.

+1 Somebody who actually understands Apple and Steve.

[moxious]

An MBA doesn't teach you to be a dreamer. Neither does an engineering degree.

But consider what personality types are drawn to different businesses...and I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering.

This is not to say that there aren't also engineers who think this way, of course there are. It's more about demographics, and which personality type is attracted by which type of work.

[sho_hn]

> I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering.

Can you expound on that a little? It's completely contrary to my life experience, where people with business degrees are mostly system followers and ladder climbers.

[bthallplz]

I can't speak for moxious, but I agreed with their post because in my understanding of business and engineering and from being around people of either backgrounds, engineering seems to firstly prize hard, analytical skills and only later on considers creative solutions, while business gets around to analyzing things after considering the things within a/the bigger picture.

In terms of seeing the forest vs. the trees: My thought is that engineering might be so concerned with seeing and analyzing the trees that they do not get around to considering the forest as a whole and recognizing where no tree presently (but could eventually) resides within that forest. (I think that "recognizing where no tree presently resides" is what a dreamer type might do.)

A big issue that I see with framing business people in this light is that few of them do seem to think entrepreneurially, but that may explain why you haven't run into more dreamer types.

[AlphaSite]

I don't know about the time or Parc, but he was a proponent of thin terminals and having all of your data being available to you everywhere.