[donnachangstein]

No one ever said he was an EE?

It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.

I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.

There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.

Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.

Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.

[danso]

> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*

Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience

https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?si=GK5NvbyND1xriiYm

[dogma1138]

No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.

If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.

[dmix]

> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details

Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well

[sambeau]

Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.

[reaperducer]

Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.

That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.

I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,

I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.

[soperj]

> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.

Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.

[pqtyw]

> A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting

We can call product design "marketing" but that's a bit like calling Linus Torvalds a "code monkey"...

[entropicdrifter]

Steve Jobs was not a product designer. He emphasized design, but he didn't design almost anything himself.

[sambeau]

I think that's a very myopic view of what Jobs did. I am of the opinion he was one of the greatest designers of all time.

Just because he didn't move pixels across the screen doesn't mean he wasn't setting the design language, defining taste, sweating detail and holding the vision. No-one would suggest that a show-runner didn't make TV, or that a director wasn't a filmmaker. Jony Ive's design changed (and improved) immensely one he was working closely with Jobs. Once Jobs was gone things drifted. Similarly Pixar was hyper-focused under Jobs then began to drift as soon as he was no longer involved.

[entropicdrifter]

Visionary and Product Designer are different jobs. Generalize them as the same thing if you like, but he was a CEO and a visionary. He didn't design products, he criticized and made demands of the designers.

[thenthenthen]

There are even more than a million of those in SZ haha