just came across this old quote from Steve Jobs

And now I miss Steve. 😢

This full interview is fantastic. on YouTube. that requires giving YouTube money but likely doesn't have gradually shifting audio volume.

somehow I disagree or at least want to emphasize a different perspective. I don't have a problem with jobs statement that there is a difference between an idea and the tangible implementation of an idea. But if you look at the conception of "personal computing" from J. C. R. Licklider's idea of a Dream machine to Xerox Parc to Apple and Microsoft. There are a couple of things that went "wrong". Is a company "body" like apple the best way in which people can communicate the gift of computation to other people (https://blog.anylist.com/2020/06/sign-in-with-apple/ ) ?

I am not trying to gloss over the many flaws in Jobs' personality. He was pretty difficult to work with, and the late Larry Tesler once told me that he was the worst boss he ever worked for. You can tell when you are in a dictatorship because there is no visible #2 waiting in the wings. And the cadre of VPs and lawyers underneath him at Apple were litigious and quite vindictive. But putting aside his personal foibles, the man was passionate about quality and tried to make things easier for the customer and he also created a publishing system with the iPhone App Store, that is the largest employer of independent programmers in the world. Nobody has ever been nicer to indie developers than Apple. When Jobs started the App store, at the time the only indie friendly publishing outlet was the Amazon Kindle bookstore, which paid a 30% royalty. After jobs launched his store paying 70%, Amazon had to backpedal and match that royalty rate. The prior CDROM industry of which i was a big participant in was destroyed by software piracy, and it is impossible for a small developer to handle distribution in over 100 countries, but that is what you get with Apple. A deposit in the bank every month with no funny business, with all the currency conversions done for you. The App store sells more software than the entire US paper publishing industry by my estimates. Apple is fairly tyrannical, and will steal ideas for their products gladly, as they live inside a hermetically sealed spaceship, and never see the outside world. So i am not some starry eyed sycophant. But let's acknowledge the great opportunities Apple is giving to independents to earn an honest living. In the famous play "Major Barbara" by GB Shaw, he has some great essays on how letting people earn an honest living is very good thing.

Just a last story on this point. I think that the sad story of Ted nelson and also Doug Engelbart, that they are indeed sad stories exactly because the "programming" culture does not make room for habits and thought oudside of the programming culture.

Thanks for the quote! From my perspective, of engineer who has been in the world of startups and building products for some time now, the point I get from the quote is that when you start with an idea, you should be prepared for what comes next, and that is the idea changing a lot as you learn more about whatever you are working on. And while a lot of people have ideas, surviving through that process of change is much harder, and requires a lot of persistence and conviction to come through, if it is even possible. Personally I enjoy hearing about how others navigated this process, as I am always trying to learn more about it and to be better at it.

Jobs was a complex person, and many just criticisms have been written about him. OTOH, talking to him around this time it was clear that he had a better vision for what computers should be (and do for their users) than anyone else running a large tech company. While he gets too much credit for "inventing" the everything Apple did, he gets too little credit for being the "Chief Q/A Officer" -- essentially the spoiled user throwing tantrums until the experience was good enough. His absence is obvious in many small, annoying details of later product developments.

Per the conception of Apple as primarily about craftsmanship, there is of course the concept of Sherlocking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term): A term used when Apple copies an existing product and bundles it into one of their other offerings (thus "sherlocking" the original product). Some notable examples: (The eponymous) Watson -> Sherlock, Konfabulator -> Dashboard, LaunchBar -> Spotlight, Growl -> Notification Center. Then of course, there are the foundational elements of the OS UI itself: Xerox Parc -> Mac Desktop, Jeff Han's Multi-Touch Work -> iPhone. Generally, what Apple excels at is taking an existing good idea, and polishing and popularizing it, which is commendable (although I wish they were better about giving credit to their sources). I actually only really think of Exposé as an innovative UI feature that (as far as I know) originated inside Apple. I'd love to hear if anyone has some other good examples?

Cover flow, the column browser (perhaps), the magnetic timeline in FCP/iMovie, the gestural UI of iPhone X (not every aspect, but many of them and their unification), the genie effect, inertial scrolling (arguably — I know), proxy icons in Get Info and window title bars, the iPod click wheel, Siri, direction-based cursor movement to submenus, the cursor shapes on iPad, HyperCard stacks / edit-mode, dragging disks to the trash to eject them & round mice (who said they had to be good), Desk Accessories, (AFAIK) hiding power-user features behind option-click

(Cover Flow was created by a third-party developer, and was purchased by Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow)

History of the column browser: Mark Miller 1980 -> NeXT -> MacOS X. A more detailed history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

If we looked at the history of metal forging, we'd probably also see a series of incremental improvements on incremental improvements, leading back to before even the first time metal was hammered or smelted. And there would have been the people saying "let's take existing object X and make it out of metal", or maybe "what other materials can we make knives out of?", which is how you'd arrive at metal knives — the confluence of separate incremental ancestries. I personally believe that the terms innovation and invention are used in situations where people are not seeing (or sharing) the true context within which an invention was merely an increment. In other words, innovation is largely an act of recontextualization.

There are two important modes at work in invention/innovation, both of which require considerable creativity. The first, which typically happens in places shielded from commerce (e.g. universities, personal projects, rare industrial labs like Bell and Xerox), is a kind of mad-eyed push into the unknown that produces novelties. The second is a process whereby people with good taste curate and refine those novelties, ultimately turning them into products. I think of these two activities as a cultural analogy to seeding and harvesting. We need support for both of these modes to get the good stuff into general use. When looked at from this perspective, Apple was one of the best harvesters we've ever seen in consumer technology. (Aside: there's been an ideological shift since the 80s that attributes all value creation to harvesting, which in turn has led to a tremendous reduction in funding for seeders. This is my guess as to why we're still using 40 year old technology today.)