Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

For years, I've kept a list of my favorite quotes. Steve Jobs is by far the most represented. In his honor, I'd like to share some of my favorites.


Steve Jobs interview with Inc. in 1989

"But I've also found that the best companies pay attention to aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them. I mean, beyond the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how they run their company, stuff like that.

[...]

We thought, why don't we take the extra few days or weeks and do it right? We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I've seen them again and again throughout my business life. They're just staggering."


Steve Jobs interview with Inc. in 1989

"Let me give you an example from NeXT. We have probably the most automated factory in the world. Our circuit board comes out untouched by human hands. We have a series of sophisticated robots, some of which we built, some of which we bought. Now these robots come in different colors, and I wanted them all painted the same color. We went through a lot of trouble over that because the robot companies weren't used to painting things in any color but their own. People in our factory asked me, "Why is it so important to paint these machines the same color? We don't understand it." So we had to sit down with everybody and explain. Even after hearing the reasons, it took people six months or so before they began to understand.

For one thing, we want the place to look nice because we bring customers through. They're going to make a decision on using NeXT products, and they ought to know that we have a very high-quality manufacturing operation. But the real reason is that we don't want people to think of the factory as separate islands of automation. We want people thinking of the whole. Suppose we have a bottleneck at one robot. In reality, you can probably rebalance the line and solve the problem -- provided you think of it as a whole. It took people six months to understand this, but now it's in their bones. We spend a lot of time going over these concepts and why they are important -- not just in the abstract, but right down to the everyday tangible point of view. That's what building a company culture is all about."


Steve Jobs in an interview with the New York Times

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."


Macworld San Francisco 1996

"If we had 4 great products, that’s all we need. And as a matter of fact, if we only had 4, we could put the A team on every single one of them. And if we only had 4, we could turn them all every 9 months instead of every 18 months. And if we only had 4, we could be working on the next generation or 2 of each one as we’re introducing the first generation. So that’s what we decided to do -- to focus on 4 great products."


Steve Jobs (unknown source)

"Here's what you find at a lot of companies. You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse."


Steve Jobs in a Rolling Stone Interview when asked about Apple’s market share in 2003

"So our market share is actually greater than BMW's — greater than Mercedes — in the car industry. And, yet, no one thinks BMW or Mercedes are going away, and no one thinks that they're at a tremendous disadvantage because that's their market share. Matter of fact, they're both highly desirable products and brands."


Thanks, Steve. You inspire us all to work harder and never settle.



Updates


Steve Jobs (unknown source)
"My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be."


Steve Jobs quoted at CNN Money
"But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't."

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Chrome OS vs. The Tablet

So a lot has happened over the last year in the mobile tech space -- the first iPad was released, iPhone 4 came out, Android has spent the year racking up market share, Windows Phone 7 started selling and many other tablet-like devices are now being teased about from lots of companies including Samsung and RIM.

Tonight, when attempting to open Chrome using Quicksilver (yes, I still use Quicksilver - it's awesome!), I accidentally opened a document sitting on my hard drive written on January 3rd, 2010. This file was a draft of an article I was hoping to put on the blog around that time. Well, apparently I forgot about it and it's been collecting dust ever since.

Almost a year later, I just read through it and was surprised how prescient it turned out to be. Just as a matter of interest, I've included it below. Keep in mind that at the time it was written, we hadn't seen the iPad and had only recently seen teasers of the Chrome OS.

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I think we can all agree that there's tablet craziness going on, with everyone and their brother making predictions about the new device. I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I'd like to think about the tablet from another vantage point - what it will likely represent and who its competitors likely are. I was thinking about this when I read Ars Technica's Google interview on Chrome OS. Something that I've sort of known in the back of my head for a while started to become clear - the Tablet is probably meant to compete in the same category as netbooks and Chrome OS. For those unfamiliar with the term, netbooks are small, light-weight, long battery life computers primarily used for internet software. Chrome OS is Google's operating system meant to run on netbooks and provide a Google experience where everything essentially runs like tabs in a browser - it's meant to replace Windows.

Now, having said that, I think it's interesting to note that netbooks and Chrome OS are really just an extension of the current UI paradigm of a mouse and standard keyboard. As such, they have to deal with a problem that the Tablet will not face - confusion about what people are getting. Is it just a small laptop? If so, why can't I install the same applications I use on my PC?"

Matthew Papakipos from Google pretty much sums it up in the interview:
"There was this thing last Christmas where OEMs sold a lot of machines that weren't running Windows and ended up getting a high return rate because they weren't very clear in their advertising and materials on the box about the fact that Windows wasn't on there. So people would bring it home and say, "Oh, I'm going to install World of Warcraft" and they'd go "Wait a minute, what is this?"

So there was some stuff like that out there. The thing that this has convinced us of is that we need to be really clear with people when they buy a Chrome OS machine that it's not a Windows machine. We do need to be really clear about that. We don't want you to end up getting a machine for Christmas and it's not one that's going to work out for you.

If you want a Windows machine you should buy a Windows machine. If you really want to use Photoshop, you should buy a Windows workstation.

But it is challenging—we haven't figured this all out. We really need to make it clear to you when you buy a machine online or in a store that this is a Web machine; it's not a Windows machine. It doesn't run Photoshop, it doesn't run WoW. What it does is get on the Web. And a lot of that we're still figuring out."

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You see, by design, this isn't a problem that Apple has to deal with. The Tablet will likely look more like a large iPhone (a well-recognized brand unto itself) than a laptop. And the software running on it will look more like iPhone software than Windows. So all someone has to do is look at this thing and know - that's not a small laptop.

I often find that when I'm working (designing, coding, or even building a room in my basement), if I hit a situation where things just don't feel right - there's a reason for it. I start to think I should really question some notions that I'm taking for granted and take an alternate route. In the quote above, I feel that same friction. The voice in my head is saying "What about the design that I've chosen is causing this issue? Where can I fundamentally re-think my design so that this goes away?"

So, as a tip to Google, I'd like to offer the notion that will likely hit them if it hasn't already - Apple has already figured out the answer to this problem and you're likely going to adapt the Android OS to follow its lead.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The "Verizon" iPhone - If I were Apple

There have been rumors about a Verizon iPhone since the first day it went on sale as an exclusive AT&T phone in the United States 4 and half years ago. Recently, however, even major publications are buzzing with speculation. In common among pretty much all the rumors is that Apple is developing a special version of the iPhone just for Verizon in a bid to increase market share in the US.

I, however, have a different idea.
Apple has been making gangbuster profits on the iPhone. One of the main reasons that this has been possible (at least in the US) is due to the very lucrative exclusivity contract with AT&T -- Apple doesn't sell the iPhone for other networks and gets a kickback in return.

At the same time, the iPhone has grown to be number one in mindshare when it comes to smartphones. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard of the iPhone. Android, meanwhile, has enjoyed little brand recognition in the way of the mass public. Standing in the way of mass adoption, however, has been the exclusivity contract.

Most people, including John Gruber of Daring Fireball, posit that Apple is in no hurry to embrace Verizon and Verizon, with Android's recent successes, is in no hurry to embrace the iPhone -- at least not to the point of either side making concessions in their agreements.

Astute as Gruber's arguments may be, I think Apple has a winning hand. They don't need to go with only Verizon. If I were Apple, I'd make a CDMA version of the iPhone and put it on sale carrier free.

Now freed from the binds of specific carriers, customers will be abusing every wireless carrier support center in the US to get one. Armed with this new leverage, Apple can create a standard contract for all interested carriers tilted very much in their favor. Rather than face the support and PR nightmare of being the only carrier without the iPhone, every one of them will fall right into line.

Apple gets the market share and deals just as they want them. Everyone else gets the iPhones they've been waiting for.

For further reading on Verizon iPhone rumors, I highly suggest John Gruber's recent posts on the matter: