upvote

points

by mvkel6 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby TheOtherHobbes12 minutes ago|
next
[-]
He's responsible for the iPhone, and effortless touch screen pocket computing has been culturally and psychologically catastrophic.

That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.

But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.

reply
upvoteby vee-kay4 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers.

Thus the FPS genre in gaming was pioneered on these pioneering machines.

Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system. Sun Microsystems partnered with NeXT, for the NeXTSTEP Solaris but lost interest, but it later created Java as a direct competitor to NeXTSTEP.

Apple used NeXT's software technologies as the foundation for Rhapsody, Mac OS X (later macOS), and the operating systems that followed.

reply
upvoteby bigstrat20032 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
> Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

Yes, very easily. He didn't actually make anything, he was a sales guy. It was the engineers who worked around him (Woz in the Apple days, others after) who deserve credit, not Jobs himself.

reply
upvoteby spider-mario1 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Doesn’t that understate it? Isn’t a sales guy still important, to figure out what to build and to actually get it in the hands of users? Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make, and the engineers just so happened to make it?
reply
upvoteby mft_40 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
I think the previous poster is wrong. In typical understanding of industry roles, a ‘sales guy’ doesn’t typically work hands-on with product development. Some variations of ‘marketing’ roles do indeed work on developing new products, so this might be less inaccurate.

But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.

The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.

reply