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Design is how it works
Would Steve Jobs consider a cheap working-class British pub cool?
As something of a celebrity and Master of the Tech Universe, a certain mythology follows the figure of Steve Jobs. A black poloneck-and-blue-jeans clad uncompromising visionary. A divinity in John Lennon spectacles without any mortal or contemporary peers. I used to think that someone like Jobs was psychologically impenetrable.
There was more to my confusion and reluctance to look more closely at the sources that discussed what made Steve Jobs tick.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton wrote in 1887. In my opinion, the next part of this paragraph is even more important.
“Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.
On one hand, there were infamous stories of how nasty Jobs could be. There are apocryphal stories of how people who got into elevators with Jobs at Apple, exited having failed to justify their presence on campus and exited jobless (see what I did there?). One story that incensed me, I had come across researching video game history, was how he promised Steve Wozniak half of a $5000 design challenge at Atari but stiffed him — sharing only $750 (claiming that was all they were given). Wozniak found out ten years later that Atari had honoured the deal and paid the full amount. Then, there’s the treatment of his first daughter, Lisa.
This view is somewhat tempered by, even though I am mostly an atheist, catching myself expressing gratitude to God, more than a few times, that I now get to work almost exclusively on Macs — they’re just so good to use — and pray that whatever peripheral nonsense Apple gets sucked into, at least, its computers stay awesome till I die. That I never have to use a Windows machine again. After all, Jobs did reconcile with his daughter in the end, didn’t he?
My older view of Jobs as indecipherable was somewhat punctured by a Youtube video I chanced upon the other day. In which Andy Miller describes accidentally stealing Steve Jobs’ laptop. The insight that Miller provides on Jobs’ design philosophy made me sit up in interest.
