John Sculley on Steve Jobs
A remarkably frank and insightful (and lengthy) interview with John Sculley, the man who infamously deposed Steve Jobs, in which he discusses Steve’s methodology and admits it was a mistake for him to have been made CEO:
The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”
On running the company in Steve’s absence:
All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve. […] Unfortunately, I wasn’t as good at it as he was.
On consumer research:
[Steve] always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be? But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days, who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people, “What did they want?” Steve didn’t believe in that.
He said, “How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.”
On Steve’s management style:
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to take someone out. And the thinking was a typical Steve Jobs observation: “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. So if it gets bigger than a hundred people, it will force us to go to a different organization structure where I can’t work that way. The way I like to work is where I touch everything.” Through the whole time I knew him at Apple that’s exactly how he ran his division.
On the difference between Apple and Microsoft:
An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Microsoft hires some of the smartest people in the world. They are known for their incredibly challenging test they put people through to get hired. It’s not an issue of people being smart and talented. It’s that design at Apple is at the highest level of the organization, led by Steve personally. Design at other companies is not there. It is buried down in the bureaucracy somewhere… In bureaucracies many people have the authority to say no, not the authority to say yes. So you end up with products with compromises. This goes back to Steve’s philosophy that the most important decisions are the things you decide NOT to do, not what you decide to do. It’s the minimalist thinking again.
Geek-Hop of the Day: Frisco native A-1 reformats the Pokémon theme song for “Charizard” off his After School Special mixtape — an ode to young A-1’s penchant for playing hooky to watch TV, referenced in samples from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Reading Rainbow, and Goosebumps.
Download the mixtape here.
(Source: thedailywhat)
Domestic Conflict, Explained By Stock Photos
Kevin Nguyen imagines the backstories behind the stock photos he found of couples fighting.
Also from The Bygone Bureau: Controversial Corporate Brands, Reviewed by Kanye West.
Chrome Experiments: Arcade Fire
Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.
See also: Official Google Blog post.
October 2 can’t come soon enough.
Apple’s Attention to Detail
In July 2002, Apple filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the sleep-indicator light fades in and out on most Apple laptops. Older models such as the Macintosh PowerBook, however, use a blinking LED indicator, with discrete pulses in one-second intervals.
The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a similar feature but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the average respiratory rate for adults during strenuous exercise—not very indicative of something in sleep-mode.
It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsessive attention to detail.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to stare at the gentle, soothing light on my Macbook Pro.
I go to music festivals for the Sign Language interpreters.
I’m not saying that being deaf is cool, but I am saying that music festivals are made much more enjoyable by the needs of deaf people.
The Emperor's New Antenna
If you read only one article about “Antennagate” (too late, I know), it should be this one.
Jonathan Ive on the Design of the iPhone 4
“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form,” says Ive. “It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”
Stars vs. The Album Leaf - Opinions Versus the Sun
I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.
Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
