Merged Steve Jobs has died.

Ethan Thane Athen said:
I can only speak for myself but I'm not arguing that his contributions were 'so little' just that he seems to be getting all the credit when most people like Apple stuff for the design and it was Johnathan Ive that designed all their flagship products.
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Awhat - "all their flagship products" - Ive wasn't around for the Apple in the garage, the Apple II, or the original Mac in '84. And while he's an excellent industrial designer, he can't and hasn't been doing it all. (Hint - there's industrial design and hardware engineering and software engineering to start).

Jobs' role was less material and therefore easy to dismiss. Most of all, he was the relentless perfectionist pain in the ass boss for whom nothing's good enough. The "vision holder" if you'll excuse a bit of management lingo.

That kind of leadership can be a good (maybe for consumers) or bad (perhaps for employees) thing, but the reality of it is that Xerox' and Engelbart's and Raskin's ideas would have been a long time coming if not for Apple and Jobs. Sure, we may be using a desktop computer with a GUI now if not for Apple and the Mac, but we'd be a decade or more behind where we are now. Windows 1.0 was a reaction to the Mac. The same thing with the smartphone - do you think touch interfaces and the Android would have the momentum they have if not for the iPhone?

It's the proverbial Columbus egg; once you've seen a brilliant idea implemented, it's obvious that it works. So obvious that it's easy to forget that it took someone to come up with it and work hard, eyes on the prize, to make it happen.

Have a read of the history of the '84 Mac, if you wish, as told by the people who worked on it. That history shows why it succeeded, and why it was so influential. It was'nt, by far, all about Steve Jobs. But it would have been very different without him.
 
Giordano said:
What Jobs did was take technology that was already out there, and made it intuitive, easy to use, and popular. Personal computers, GUIs, mp3 players, tablets, music and video distribution, tech stores, computer animation, smart phones... Jobs took quirky technology that only geeks loved and made it into wildly successful, desired products. Look how much other companies have followed Apples lead in each of these areas.
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This, very much this.

I see Jobs's biggest legacy as the guy who realised, back when the entire industry was obsessed with power, only power and more of it at any cost, that computers and gadgets had to be usable by the average man on the street, not just limited to the ones with technical know-how.

He didn't look at Apple's products and ask his engineers to squeeze more power out of them, he asked instead for his engineers to make them user friendly.

User-friendly, that's what Jobs has left us asking from our technology.
 
Here's an interesting article about how Jobs and Apple took the ideas they saw at Xerox PARC and basically ran with them:

Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation

A short excerpt:

In the legend of Xerox PARC, Jobs stole the personal computer from Xerox. But the striking thing about Jobs’s instructions to Hovey is that he didn’t want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. “You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons—three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse,” Hovey went on. “The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important.”

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs’s imagination. Xerox PARC’s innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user’s intention and the computer’s response. Jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized “direct manipulation.” If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that’s appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.
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ThatSoundAgain said:
That kind of leadership can be a good (maybe for consumers) or bad (perhaps for employees) thing, but the reality of it is that Xerox' and Engelbart's and Raskin's ideas would have been a long time coming if not for Apple and Jobs.
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Thanks for reminding me of Jef. He died of pancreatic cancer when I was in the hospital for pancreatitis, which didn't make me happy.
 
Minoosh said:
Never mind the cult of personality - I'm into the cult of easy, the cult of plug-n-play. Apple products pretty much taught me how to use them. My first computer was a Mac because it was compatible with everything at work. Everything worked great.

In a way it's a handicap because now nothing on a PC seems intuitive to me, and PCs are more common in my new field and in the world at large.

PCs make me feel dumb. Macs made me feel smart. In a way that feeling is the product. And my reverence doesn't have anything to do with Jobs, I just like feeling smart.
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Here, here. It scares me every time my father turns on his PC; he's so hopeless with computers that my brother and I had to set up some basic stuff and hide the rest from him (easy to do). And my roommate's mother is too dangerous with an iMac, never mind a PC (yes, she really was dumb enough to drag the hard drive icon to the trash).
 
Steve jobs succumbs to alternative medicine

Say it ain't so...

Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apple’s board, and Apple’s board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet [UPDATE] prescribed by the alternative medicine promoter Dr. Dean Ornish.
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Link
 
ThatSoundAgain said:
Awhat - "all their flagship products" - Ive wasn't around for the Apple in the garage, the Apple II, or the original Mac in '84. And while he's an excellent industrial designer, he can't and hasn't been doing it all. (Hint - there's industrial design and hardware engineering and software engineering to start).

......
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I listed the products he designed earlier and they encompass the ones that really made Apple the media darlings they became.

And I'm perfectly clued up on hardware and software engineering, having worked in the industry for over 20 years thank you, so no need of a 'hint'. As I also made clear in my earlier posts, I am talking about design in its common usage ie the style of the things, as that is what they are often lauded for (hence the view of non-fanboys that Apple products are often style rather than substance - see my earlier comments on the iphone).

I have also made clear that I agree Jobs deserves significant credit - just not the ridiculously over the top deification and not for the design (as defined earlier).

Don't disagree with the substance of the rest of your post though.
 
Now. Now. Just because he had a treatable cancer but delayed proper treatment for nine months, does not prove that "treatment" recommended by bestselling author Dr. Dean Ornish, does not work. He was told that the food in the "special" diet was not to be cooked in pans but the restaurant he was dining in ignored these instructions and cooked the food in pans anyway. See: http://www.cultofmac.com/2709/steve-jobs-treated-his-cancer-at-veggie-restaurant/ :rolleyes:

:boggled:
 
It might not be so. I've read many claims by people saying to be in the know that he never stopped conventional treatment as the first option while trying other diet and lifestyle changes, some of which they say were to prepare for the surgery that he did eventually have.

If he did delay treatment for nine months, that was probably a bad idea and we can speak out against such reliance on nonsense. However, we really don't have the most needed details as it appears that he was very private about all of that. So be ready to take back any criticism should new facts come to light.
 
Brian Dunning's assessment has been criticised rationally by Orac.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/steve_jobs_neuroendocrine_tumors_and_alt.php

So, is it possible, even likely, that Jobs compromised his chances of survival? Yes. Is it definite that he did? No, it's not, at least it's not anywhere as definite as Dunning makes it sound. In fact, based on statistics alone, it's unlikely that a mere nine months took Jobs "from the high end to the low end of the survival rate," as Dunning puts it. That's just not how insulinomas usually behave from a biological standpoint. They're too indolent, and that's not even taking into account issues of lead time bias and other confounding factors that would make comparisons of operating early versus operating later not as straightforward as one might think.
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Ethan Thane Athen said:
Lamuella said:
I'd say it's more like crediting George Martin for the songs of the Beatles. And frankly George Martin deserves a reasonable chunk of that credit.
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Funnily enough, that's the other analogy that was in my mind.
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So did Brian Wilson's dad, apparently.
 
51st percentile of survival in after diagnosis of pancreas cancer is 6 MONTHS. 9 years is phenomenal. If anything, it says the alternative treatments helped.

My own brother made it 9 months. My last name is Case, hence the Casebro name. He tried chemo, etc. Probably would have had a better few months without it, alternative instead, even if worthless... At least friends would not have walked up to me and asked how he was doing, while he was standing right there. Jaundiced bald skeleton, hard to recognize him.
 
casebro said:
51st percentile of survival in after diagnosis of pancreas cancer is 6 MONTHS. 9 years is phenomenal. If anything, it says the alternative treatments helped.
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Except that the pancreatic cancer Jobs had was a rare form which has a much higher survival rate, given real treatment.
The alternative non-treatments did not help. They just made the avoidable unavoidable.
 
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