Given his similar life experience Jobs could smell his own.

Woz and an endless stream of actual engineers developed Apple hardware.

Steve just focused on minutiae and details he cared about. He could not engineer his way out of a wet paper sack he would be too stuck on the color of the sack.

Always the bike shedder, never the painter.

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moscoe 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the engineers likely had no taste or vision. Takes both types to make something great. Steve could synergize and extract greatness from teams of individuals. On their own, they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substantial.

	▲	argee 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel like at least some of Steve’s later personality has to have been influenced by interactions such as the one with Bill Atkinson, where he was told rounded corners were "incredibly difficult" to program, only to come up with an implementation a mere 24 hours later. A lifetime of such interactions, such as the one with Larry Kenyon, might have taught him that people aren’t going to do anything (unless he really really insists) and consistently lie to him.
	▲	altmanaltman 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What is the basis of assuming "they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substanial"? Seems like something Jobs would like you to think but come on, Apple has been a massive company for every long, there is an army of people working on "vision" not Jobs just connecting to the cosmos and figuring out everything like an oracle. There is the man and then there is the hype, and i think most fall for the hype over the man.
	▲	hoKayDo 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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Grombobulous 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft could use someone like that, though.

You don’t need an engineer to be the CEO of the company. The company has hundreds or thousands of engineers already.

The CEO’s job isn’t to make things, it’s to make decisions - and often it’s helpful for that person to have a strong sense of taste.

I’m reminded of this interview with Rick Rubin: https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/rick-rubin-i-have...

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dilyevsky 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why didn’t those amazing engineers develop great hardware before or after jobs?

	▲	fragmede an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, the Apple Vision Pro is absolutely amazing hardware. It may not quite have found product market fit, but the hardware itself is something else.