Post by OriOn Oct 6, 5:00 am, Alan Tignanelli
Post by Alan TignanelliFar too soon. A true visionary.
There aren't that many individual people that left such an enormous
footprint on the world. He didn't invent GUI but the original
Macintosh was the first system that proved it's importance, PC's
developed as they did because of a Steve Jobs innovation.
Remember all those "what's in your CD player" threads? Those became
"what's your iPod spinning lately?" threads. Or would have if this
group didn't slow down as it did.
I am posting this with an Android phone, which is directly patterned
after the iPhone. Almost all my posts are now. iPad is also a
descendant of the iPhone, a larger more powerful version of it
essentially, as are all the other tablets that followed. Eventually I
believe they will completely replace the laptops we use now, although
they're not there yet. What comes after that? We'll have to wait until
another Steve Jobs comes along.
All these things probably would have happened anyway, in some other
way. I think there's a subtler lesson here, and my favorite example
for it is this: Take a MacBook. Flip it over and look at it. Now do
the same with a Windows laptop: It looks like the death star. Screws,
little trap doors, trenches, ventilation holes, laser turrets -
probably a womp rat or two.
Details matter. When you care enough about details to make the bottom
of an object look as good as the top side even though that's the side
you never see, you get stuff done. If you can make a group of people
care about those details as much as you do, you can get great stuff
done. But you really have to care about it.
That, and making things simple. My buddy and I have both been switching to Macs over the last
couple years (once there was a viable way to run Windows on them so we didn't screw up our work
stuff), and we've grown fond of saying, "I can't believe how much easier this is." Yeah, I used to
tear apart PCs and do a fair amount of tinkering, but I don't miss it. I kind of chuckle when guys
talk about how much cheaper they can get a PC for, and they're right - but you can get cheaper Macs,
too. And more expensive ones. They're not the same things. And I spend so much less time setting
up Macs than I ever did w/PCs.
And ripping them for style? That's a complete joke - Smeenus has seen me and can testify to the
lack of a line of women waiting for my attention, unlike, say, Brad Pitt.
There are things I don't like about how the iPod operates, but it's a brilliant device. To think
that 20 years ago, I was walking around with a Walkman with a cassette player, and here I am today,
with a smaller device that holds a version of almost my entire CD collection in my pocket. And if I
were more accepting of downloads, I wouldn't even need the CDs any more. Who'd have thought we'd be
in a situation like this?
Jobs - a computer guy, no less - found a way to do what the music industry couldn't, accept and pay
for downloaded music. Remember when people said the iTunes store was doomed to fail because pay
would never compete with free downloads? It seems to be doing pretty well - well enough that Mac
applications are moving to a similar model.
But Ori summed it up much more succinctly than I did - details matter. Jobs got the details right -
form factors, appearance, ease of use.
Alan