The Cult of Steve Jobs or The Emperors New Clothes

[MisterBubbles]

Ok im pretty sorry the guy has passed away and condolences to his family, but the cult of his being a genius has to stop. I think Steve Jobs was a great marketer and had and eye for bringing products to the market at the right time, but most of his ideas where borrowed (and i use that term lightly) from others. Steve Jobs or Apple never invented the keyboard or mouse, Steve Jobs or Apple didnt invent the portable music player, Steve Jobs or Apple didnt invent the tablet, all theses ideas where out before and Apple just took fancy marketing and advertising to sell them again and bring them to a new audience. If he was such a genius, how did the mac flop the first time it as out?
I'm waiting on the Apple fanboys to totally flame me on this post, but i believe what i said is true.

Discuss...

[SuperDanX]

Ok im pretty sorry the guy has passed away and condolences to his family, but the cult of his being a genius has to stop. I think Steve Jobs was a great marketer and had and eye for bringing products to the market at the right time, but most of his ideas where borrowed (and i use that term lightly) from others. Steve Jobs or Apple never invented the keyboard or mouse, Steve Jobs or Apple didnt invent the portable music player, Steve Jobs or Apple didnt invent the tablet, all theses ideas where out before and Apple just took fancy marketing and advertising to sell them again and bring them to a new audience. If he was such a genius, how did the mac flop the first time it as out?
I'm waiting on the Apple fanboys to totally flame me on this post, but i believe what i said is true.

Discuss...


Sent from my iPad

Don't understand why this bothers you? I don't really have an opinion on it one way or the other, but I'm bemused that people are getting so het up about it, and some people, not you, are just being downright nasty.


Edit: why's this in general gaming??

[Neon Ignition]

I agree, he was a marketer for the most part. iTunes is a very poorly built online store, the ipod is just a hard drive with a screen, the iphone exactly the same with a phone function, the ipad is an inflated ipod. There's no genius to any of these designs beyond that of effective marketing and strong usability. In the wider, less reported, circles of his career there are some real developments in partnerships and teams he's worked in but the media and some of the public seem to have some moronic idea of Jobs sitting alone in a room creating all this stuff. It's made by R&D teams. He was clearly an excellent business man having salvaged Apples fortunes once and there should be very real concerns about the longevity of the companies fortunes without him given his role there, the age of the aesthetics Apple trades on and the lack of any real technological progression the company has made in the last few years.

[EvilBoris]

I guess he was the companie's figurehead and regardless of how much overall influence he had over the company and all of the very clever things it has done in the last 10 years, he is going to get lots of credit for it.

There are plenty of reasons that the First Mac's didn't do quite as well as PCs with the launch of Win95, but the marketplace would of been significantly different and regardless of that past flop, it hasn't done them any harm in the long run now they are one of the biggest most profitable companies in the world, up there with the giant companies that supply the world's oil. That alone is absolutely crazy, a company that makes computers and phones being as big as an oil film.

He must of been a business genius to get where he did and to have his finger in not only the apple pie, but the pixar pie too.

[Brad]

I think you have to ask why, when every bit of tech apple ever made had already been done before, was apple successful when everything before failed? Repeatedly, across multiple products. That cannot be pure luck or marketing. It's not genius but it's something more than luck I think.

[Baseley09]

Same with Sony and the Playstation, there had been many gaming systems before, but look what happened.

[Matt]

The Apple Cult scares me. The blind belief that just because something is Apple means it is superior to anything else. It's the ultimate fanboy mentality.

Great marketing department, and many gullible people

[EvilBoris]

They've got themselves into a truly unique position where it almost seems like they can't do anything wrong, the marketing has really got into people's minds and people will blindly buy the products without much though.

And whilst people may say that they don't offer up the fastest most upto date technology in their products, doing so keeps costs down and allows them to absolutely rake in the cash when they then go on and sell it for double the cost of the more upto date products.

And much like with games consoles the fixed hardware environments allow them to improve stability , useabilitly and efficientcy way above and beyond competitors products.

Saying that, I'd still rather update my Windows PC twice as often than pay twice as much for one Mac.

[Brad]

Wow so much hate here. I didn't realise I used a mac and an iPhone because I'm gullible. I thought it was because I find the competing products inferior.

I don't blindly buy anything and I don't buy stuff just because it's apple.

[toythatkills]

The Apple Cult scares me. The blind belief that just because something is Apple means it is superior to anything else. It's the ultimate fanboy mentality.

Great marketing department, and many gullible people

The only thing worse than an Apple fanboy is someone that will happily write off everything Apple has ever made without actually using it, calling Apple fans gullible when they're exactly as bad, they've just gullibly been suckered into a pathetic anti-Apple mentality instead.

This might come as a shock to people, but Apple products are well respected because they're genuinely very good, and usually far better than what else is on the market. There's no other phone that even comes close to the iPhone, and if you'd owned one for a period of time you'd realise that, but it's much easier to say "OMG APPLE FANBOYS" without actually making any effort to see why people might like using iPhones.

If Jobs was just excellent at marketing and bringing the right products to the right people at the right time, so what? That's as difficult a skill in business as literally anything else, and the amount of money his company made is testament to how good he was at that. I bet you couldn't name a single business that wouldn't have loved to have had Jobs running it.

iTunes is ****, though, obvs.

Regardless, the man has died of a terrible illness and this thread is in bad taste.

[Daragon]

Wow so much hate here. I didn't realise I used a mac and an iPhone because I'm gullible. I thought it was because I find the competing products inferior.

I don't blindly buy anything and I don't buy stuff just because it's apple.

When you say you own a mac, is that short for macbook? Macbooks, which are highly overpriced and highly overrated? I could have a product inferior in every way to my laptop for several times what I paid for it.

Sounds like a winner to me....

[Flabio]

There's a relevant quote here that I use often.

"The idea is the easy part, success comes only from great execution".

Better men than me have written about how Apple took the ideas Xerox had but were unwilling to take a financial risk on and made them work.

Steve's talent was marrying the cool ideas that were out there with the right people to get them into the hands of consumers.

No more. No less. But that's still no small thing.

[averybluemonkey]

His talent was also in lieing and cheating, openly, bold faced lieing and defamation of competitor's products on stage. Green lighting ad campaigns that later had to be revoked by advertising standards agencies due to misleading information. Apple's products weren't that superior to the competitor's products but the public were trained to think they were through snazzy advertising to such an extent that journalists even starting purposefully undermining Apple's competitors to stay in their good books.

[Dogg Thang]

I think you have to ask why, when every bit of tech apple ever made had already been done before, was apple successful when everything before failed? Repeatedly, across multiple products.

FSW asks a question here that really sums it all up.

As for not being able to anything wrong, they've done plenty wrong. AppleTV seems to have been a half-baked idea that the world isn't quite ready for. Apple's wonderful marketing hasn't made that a runaway success because, for the most part, a product is its marketing. What was that other thing - the Pico, or something? Apple have had plenty of failures and have changed direction quite a few times - even fairly recently when they changed the iPod shuffle design and then pretty much changed it back. Launching the iPhone without being able to copy/paste? Apple do loads wrong on a fairly regular basis.

And it's in taking those risks, allowing themselves the failures, that they found the successes. And, ultimately, what you do right matters more than what you do wrong. The iPhone, in its lifetime, has had a list of problems a mile long. Who cares? Not a huge amount of people because what it does right is far more important.

From what I can tell, Jobs was instrumental in that risk-taking approach. It has paid off and you might not like it but the influence can't be denied.

[noobish hat]

You mean Pippin? Pico was by Sega.