[delinka]

My sibling comments seem to all want to attribute this foresight to Jobs alone. Jobs had an organization of designers and engineers informing him. Not only informing, but collaborating. He’d express a vision, others would help shape and hone based on existing tech, or based on how they could build new tech, and eventually Jobs would present the vision and solution publicly.

And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.

[davidy123]

"Great artists steal." Jobs identified an overall vision that was something like "to sell great technology." This later became refined into something that was a little "different" as Apple latched onto the "better alternative" image when confronted with clone PCs.

Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.

[azinman2]

As CS people who love uniformity and abstraction, this idea of objects everywhere is very appealing. But concretely, what actually are you restricted from doing today? I question the tangible executions of this into a variety of everyday examples versus one or two talking points.

[davidy123]

Being able to easily use the data from one application in another. Being able to learn one set of digital tools and apply them to nearly any task (copy and paste being an example). I don't think you have to be a basement dweller to see benefits from these, and there are others.

[azinman2]

Ad hominem aside, can we dig in to this? What application data are you want it to put into something else and you currently can’t? All major office suites already let you embed between their apps, so what non-office suite task are you trying to accomplish? And once you’ve done it, how do you figure you’re supposed to interact with it? Does the native application UI now need to morph to this unrelated object?

We’ve had object technologies before in mainstream environments (OpenDoc, COM), and yet they’re effectively dead today. They were very complex, and the main pathways can be explicitly supported with better UX when the target apps are written with what’s supported in mind.

[Aloha]

Jobs used a very Walt Disney like approach, he was always plussing, and looking for a weenie in the products he worked on.

[holoduke]

That's with virtually every thing in the world. It's never a true single man show. The great thing about jobs and similar people is that they can effectively let people work together with all having a common shared belief.

[Austin_Conlon]

Jobs on several occasions ended keynotes by mentioning the various teams and leaders involved in the announced products. I do see though the perception of it being a one man show, as he spent so much of the time presenting.

[trixie_]

No one thinks Jobs or Musk comes up with all the ideas, or 'takes credit' for others work.

They are the figureheads of their respective companies. And just as the engineer builds the product, their job is to sell it. You'd be lucky to work for a company with people at the top as persuasive as Jobs or Musk.

[andrekandre]

i’m not so sure... to people in industry that’s probably true, but to the average person/consumer, i would say that’s probably a different story...

[Hoasi]

> but to the average person/consumer, i would say that’s probably a different story...

Not really, people are not stupid. They can see through that.