[sandee]

"He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. "

Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?

[philwelch]

A lot of billionaires live in "ordinary people situations" more than you think. There's always the Bill Gates or Larry Ellisons of the world building supermansions and owning all the yachts, but Steve wasn't exactly one of those. And mere millionaires largely can't afford anything more than living like ordinary people.

And there are a lot of ways that rich people can't actually get anything more special than anyone else, at least not easily. It's not feasible to build hospitals just for rich people, so a billionaire goes to the same hospitals as ordinary people. Consumer electronics don't generally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so a billionaire has the same kind of stuff ordinary people have.

[Stratoscope]

> There's always the Bill Gates or Larry Ellisons of the world building supermansions and owning all the yachts, but Steve wasn't exactly one of those.

Indeed. I've run into Steve three times. Twice we were both shopping for produce at a natural food store (Country Sun in Palo Alto, and the old Richard's Natural Foods in Los Gatos).

The last time was just a year ago. I sat down for dinner on the patio at La Strada, a nice Italian restaurant on University Avenue a few doors down from the Palo Alto Apple store, and there were Steve and his daughter at the next table. After dinner they took a stroll down University Avenue, just the two of them. I imagine they were probably going to get some frozen yogurt. I thought to myself, "Doesn't he have some security? A bodyguard? Something?"

There are a lot of Silicon Valley executives who I'd recognize if I saw them. But Steve is the only one who I've ever run into doing ordinary things like produce shopping.

[sandee]

"situation" is about putting a different level of constraints on them and asking them to optimize within those. And not necessarily involving only buying stuff.

[hugh3]

Do I have to be cold-hearted cynic guy again? Fine.

He redesigned things around his hospital room because he had a pad and pencil, and he was bored. There's no reason to believe that the X-ray machine he drew was better than the X-ray machines designed by X-ray machine designers with a better idea of the details and tradeoffs involved with designing X-ray machines. And that's no insult to Steve, because I'm sure he knew that too -- he was just drawing for the sake of drawing.

[hugh3]

Actually, on second thoughts I feel the need to contradict myself: Steve Jobs probably could have done a pretty good job of redesigning the user interfaces of these machines. Many devices in the "big fancy machine" category have terrible user interfaces, because the people who design them spend all their effort on the fancy internal bits, and then just stick a bunch of random buttons on, without a great deal of thought put into usability.