[notburnt]

Also interesting is how Kay dismisses Job's objections as being motivated by needing to put someone down.

I can as easily see them being constructive usability criticisms: details that the engineers steeped in developing it missed, but concrete things that would stop actual customer adoption.

[steego]

> Also interesting is how Kay dismisses Job's objections as being motivated by needing to put someone down.

You realize that's a thing, right? People do that on both a conscious and subconscious level. Some people actively play those manipulation games, especially creative sales people. Some people merely benefit from that tactic without fully appreciating that they're doing it.

I wasn't there, so I can't weigh in. It could be that Kay was projecting, and it could be that Kay is a perceptive person and was merely recognizing a young cocky kid using an old power tactic.

[alankay1]

You folks are missing some easily found and verified knowledge. For example, I knew Steve very well after this while I was Chief Scientist at Atari, and he hired me as an Apple Fellow in 1984. I was the person who took Steve to the group in Marin County who became Pixar. Steve used to send me "things" (like the iPad before it came out) for my opinion. I'm simply "reporting Steve".

[notburnt]

I realize that. Thanks for the condescension. But, you realize that people aren't motivated by just one thing, right? Even if they are business people, right?

Anyway, knowing what we know about Job's obsession with getting things right (as he saw it), you do think that his sniping at specific look and feel issues was just to put the engineers down?

To me, it's a more cohesive picture if I interpret his actions as being motivated by obsession to UX/asking more of engineers ( I know these guys weren't working for him).

But, as you said, neither of us were there.

[alankay1]

Hi -- making up coherent stories is not a good way to find out what is going on. In this case, there is a lot of background information that could help to create a more supported opinion. (Humans can't help having opinions but we should put the unsupported ones in limbo at the very least.)

[pierre_d528]

Misplaced but cannot comment under the original one.

You wrote: "I don't take notes. (It's worth pondering whether taking notes is really an aid to internal remembering...)"

This is fascinating. Somehow, when what is out there is reflected "correctly" in the mind, it stays there in a highly connected way.

Here is an other one that does not take notes and apparently understands things.

"After high school, Scholze continued to pursue this interest in number theory and geometry at the University of Bonn. In his mathematics classes there, he never took notes, recalled Hellmann, who was his classmate. Scholze could understand the course material in real time, Hellmann said. “Not just understand, but really understand on some kind of deep level, so that he also would not forget.”"

and:

"Yet even with the benefit of Scholze’s explanations, perfectoid spaces are hard for other researchers to grasp, Hellmann said. “If you move a little bit away from the path, or the way that he prescribes, then you’re in the middle of the jungle and it’s actually very hard.” But Scholze himself, Hellmann said, “would never lose himself in the jungle, because he’s never trying to fight the jungle. He’s always looking for the overview, for some kind of clear concept.”"

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/peter-scholze-and-the-future-...

An other one who described something similar was Alexander Grothendiek in "Récoltes et semailles": (apx traduced from French) "Understanding something is like removing shards from one's eyes." He was known to be completely still when trying to understand/solve something... yet it took him a lot of energy. Understanding something is also understanding how it works, thus simulating it in one's mind. In fact reflecting about something is probably identical to simulating it in one's mind.

Can this be thought in a repeatable way? (or at all?)

Pascal has the perfect excuse for my misplaced and not short enough comment.

[notburnt]

Speculation based on a coherent story is a short-cut when I am deferring actual research: a back of envelope calculation.

So, you got me: I didn't actually research the events :)

But, where would I start with such research?[0] It seems like articles are written with a specific narrative in mind: either Jobs as genius or Jobs as copy cat.

Is there anything I could look at that's sort of independently verified/agreed upon as being the truth? Does such a thing even exist? I hope it does.

It feels like these events have gone into annals of legend, not history :)

[0] is this reliable? https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html.

[steego]

> I realize that. Thanks for the condescension. But, you realize that people aren't motivated by just one thing, right? Even if they are business people, right?

I'm still not sure you do realize it. People are motivated by a lot of things, and sometimes people are willing to do dirty, shitty, manipulative tactics to get what they want.

One person said Jobs was as focused as a monk, but without the empathy. But that's one person, right?

> you do think that his sniping at specific look and feel issues was just to put the engineers down?

Funny you mention that. You know when he called up Bob Belleville from Xerox, he told him his work was shit and everything he had done was meaningless and that he should work for him. Do you think he was "obsessed with getting things right" and simply being critical, or does it sound like someone who is feeling out an engineer's low self-esteem much in the same way a pimp feels out a prospective ho?

You still don't think Jobs was above putting down the Xerox engineers to elevate himself and denigrate their own self-esteem?

He lied to Woz about money is his first business dealing and took credit for his work. He made sport of humiliating a prospective employees by asking if he was a virgin and then humiliating him in front of other people.

You may not realize it, but putting people down is a tactic actually works on some people. Some people have a capacity to insult people and make those people love them. I know, because I've worked with a number of these guys. They're usually in sales, and they're usually pretty good at it.

Jobs was a lot of things, and it could very easily argued he had an incredible capacity to be cruel, callous, petty and manipulative, especially in his younger days. I'm sure he could be a great guy too, but it's clear he also had a capacity to be a giant flaming asshole.

It sounds like you tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. That's not a bad thing, but sometimes you have to recognize that some people simply don't mind manipulating people. Does that round out your cohesive picture?

> But, as you said, neither of us were there.

Sure, but you're the only one who's discounting the account of the person who was there just because it doesn't fit your cohesive picture.

[alankay1]

We weren't "engineers" at Parc, but a combination of many talents (check out the actual histories of the place -- why waste time speculating when there is much you could learn?)

[notburnt]

I went with the "engineers" label in response to the "business people" label by parent. I like neither when ascribing intents to actions.

Anyway, I like to give benefit of doubt when attributing intent to people's actions. As evidenced by the responses, seems like I'm off the mark here. Over and out :)

[justin66]

From the article:

First, it’s worth understanding that many people (perhaps even a thousand or more) had seen live demos of the Alto and Smalltalk before Steve. This is because Steve showed up in 1979, and the Alto and Smalltalk had been running for 6 years (starting in the first half of 1973), and we were a relatively open lab for visiting colleagues and other interested people (like Herbie Hancock and Al Gore).

[notburnt]

Yeah, I read that: seems to support my point. Basically: they had been doing it for years, but Jobs saw what was missing to make it actually usable.

Could be wrong: I wasn't there :)

[alankay1]

Yes, you are wrong. Do a little more work and reading, and you'll readily find out a bit more.

[justin66]

You're wrong because the system already had users, and was by definition usable.

Jobs was throwing off first impressions, not deep or well considered insights. The question is why a person would go negative in such a situation.

[steego]

He's also wrong because Jobs never assembled a team to create a desktop PC that was as powerful, simple, extensible and well thought out as the full Alto stack.

Even when they started NeXT, they still didn't fully realize the full potential of full dynamic, late bounded, messaged based object-oriented programming system.