[keeganpoppen]

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc.

i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.

[Kon5ole]

I agree, he was one of a kind.

Anyone with a hot negative take on Steve Jobs should watch some of the interviews and presentations he gave as early as the 80s. To me he comes across as a really sharp and surprisingly genuine person. Certainly with flaws but compared to others he just seems real, for lack of a better word.

The things he says are sometimes amazingly prescient, like the interview was made in the 2000s instead of decades earlier, and it's interesting how much effort he puts in to trying to explain it to those who had no idea. It certainly impresses me, when I see it with the benefit of knowing what happened.

I would have loved to see his take on the current AI developments. There is a primordial stew bubbling now that reminds me of both the personal computer and smartphone revolutions but nobody in the circus seems to have any real idea what the most important implications are. I think Steve might have.

[gyomu]

> it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring

Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.

Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.

[robomartin]

> the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses"

In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.

When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.

[keeganpoppen]

i… lowkey agree with this, by the way. unpopular opinion though it may be/seem.

[robomartin]

I might be unpopular, but that does not make it not real. I have witnessed this kind of thing multiple times in different organizations and at different levels over my 40+ year career.

I think of it as what happens in the show Survivor, where people sometimes team-up and vote out the strongest players because they perceive them as a threat, rather than taking advantage of them to help the team advance in the game. In other words, it's human nature.