I have to agree, and a lot of the other responses in this thread are disheartening/annoying.
The biggest thing Steve Jobs brought to Apple was to build a culture that supported his vision. Apple as a whole is focused on the mold that Steve brought back with him. Tim Cook has been the avatar and excellence in this image on the operations/production side. A company that has AMAZING profit margins on it's products due to the operational efforts to buying up needed parts ahead of time, etc. I suspect Jonathan Ive will be able to continue the design esthetic. Apple is a company running on all cylinders to deliver focused products. This differs greatly from the Apple before Job's returned. Will the focus erode? Possibly, maybe some of the perfection will be lost, but there is a much stronger base in plance than ANY other company in the valley in the last 20+ years.
Compare this with Microsoft when Bill Gates steped down. While, I personally feel that MSFT has made some positive steps in mobile with the Nokia partnership and WinPhone 7 doesn't suck, the company wasn't focused. Each department was kinda doing it's own thing. Ballmer was left to try and build something out of a lot of disparite pieces. As such, MSFT, as a stock, has basically flatlined for 10+ years.
I think it is safe to say, outside of Hewlett & Packard (more recently) and the Fairchild Eight, no single person has been more influential on the Bay Area technology scene in my lifetime (born and raised here). I will go one step further, and state, I don't see any of the current "elite" Paige/Brin/Zuck/Ellison(he's still around and strong) contributing anywhere as much.
Steve, like Bill and Dave, Gordon Moore (etal), are in a class of their own.
I've loved/hated AAPL products over the years, but Steve has been nothing but a gem for the valley.
I find humility in things like deciding to ship without copy/paste, or the decision to ship the initial phone without an SDK. These decisions are an implicit admission that the company wasn't able to get these things sufficiently polished or thought-through to include in a given iteration.
That's an interesting take. I've not thought of it that way. Apple doesn't include everything a device obviously should have in the first iteration but what it does include it does very well.
All of the iPad competitor devices absolutely suck at looking up the definition of a word in an ebook. (The ones I've tried that is.) On the iPad it is so simple, so intuitive, and quite fast. When they do something they do it well.
You don't understand that the Kindle is geared towards something very specific. Apple is building an entire OS. You can three-finger tap to get the dictionary, after highlighting, in iOS 5.
Sidenote: Apple views these gestures as the equivalent to keyboard shortcuts. For the end user you want to create the obvious so they won't be confused.
Comments
Gruber at his best. I get the feeling that he's had large pieces of this particular post in the works for quite some time.
I have to agree, and a lot of the other responses in this thread are disheartening/annoying.
The biggest thing Steve Jobs brought to Apple was to build a culture that supported his vision. Apple as a whole is focused on the mold that Steve brought back with him. Tim Cook has been the avatar and excellence in this image on the operations/production side. A company that has AMAZING profit margins on it's products due to the operational efforts to buying up needed parts ahead of time, etc. I suspect Jonathan Ive will be able to continue the design esthetic. Apple is a company running on all cylinders to deliver focused products. This differs greatly from the Apple before Job's returned. Will the focus erode? Possibly, maybe some of the perfection will be lost, but there is a much stronger base in plance than ANY other company in the valley in the last 20+ years.
Compare this with Microsoft when Bill Gates steped down. While, I personally feel that MSFT has made some positive steps in mobile with the Nokia partnership and WinPhone 7 doesn't suck, the company wasn't focused. Each department was kinda doing it's own thing. Ballmer was left to try and build something out of a lot of disparite pieces. As such, MSFT, as a stock, has basically flatlined for 10+ years.
I think it is safe to say, outside of Hewlett & Packard (more recently) and the Fairchild Eight, no single person has been more influential on the Bay Area technology scene in my lifetime (born and raised here). I will go one step further, and state, I don't see any of the current "elite" Paige/Brin/Zuck/Ellison(he's still around and strong) contributing anywhere as much.
Steve, like Bill and Dave, Gordon Moore (etal), are in a class of their own.
I've loved/hated AAPL products over the years, but Steve has been nothing but a gem for the valley.
I have to agree. It's been awhile since I've read something like this from him. Well-chosen words throughout the whole post.
The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility.
Good text, but maybe not well-chosen words throughout the whole post. Humility is a little too much.
I find humility in things like deciding to ship without copy/paste, or the decision to ship the initial phone without an SDK. These decisions are an implicit admission that the company wasn't able to get these things sufficiently polished or thought-through to include in a given iteration.
That's an interesting take. I've not thought of it that way. Apple doesn't include everything a device obviously should have in the first iteration but what it does include it does very well.
All of the iPad competitor devices absolutely suck at looking up the definition of a word in an ebook. (The ones I've tried that is.) On the iPad it is so simple, so intuitive, and quite fast. When they do something they do it well.
Er, what? At least in the Kindle app on Honeycomb, you just long press a word to see its definition.
You don't understand that the Kindle is geared towards something very specific. Apple is building an entire OS. You can three-finger tap to get the dictionary, after highlighting, in iOS 5.
Sidenote: Apple views these gestures as the equivalent to keyboard shortcuts. For the end user you want to create the obvious so they won't be confused.
I don't think that select and three-finger-tap is anywhere close to obvious- doing anything with more than two fingers is already pretty rare on iOS.
Yep, I read using the Kindle app every day and since I am not a native english speaker I use this function a lot and it works quite well.
I've been quite critical of Gruber recently, but I agree. A wonderful, thoughtful, and bittersweet post.
Either that or he wrote all of the post in that nervous jolt.