On the one hand, Steve Jobs is a brilliant technologist and an even better strategist.
It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want.
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So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”
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At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn’t great. It just wasn’t great. We stopped production for five months…. We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn’t had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.
On the other hand, he’s a tyrant at work and a sometime dick in his personal life.
When Jobs had his own illegitimate child, also at the age of 23, he too struggled with his responsibilities. For two years, though already wealthy, he denied paternity while Lisa’s mother went on welfare. At one point Jobs even swore in a signed court document that he couldn’t be Lisa’s father because he was “sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child.”
That mirrors how I feel about Apple the company. Apple products have transformed for the better how I work and listen to music. At the same time, I hate Apple’s overzealous secrecy and overpriced, patent-protected accessories.
