I'm critical of John Gruber on many topics, but in this essay he is exactly right. Further, there are many examples, just like the Bill Gates one, where Jobs says something that is true[1] and Isaacson assumes its the "reality distortion field" and then quotes someone else, like gates, who has an agenda, telling a lie as "proof" that Jobs is lying.
Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way? I am not. I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.)
For instance, remember the introduction of the iPhone? How about the introduction of the iPad? Everyone here should be old enough to remember one or both of these keynotes. Surely Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" would be deployed to maximum effect at such keynotes-- and after both of them I remember much derision and claims that Jobs had the RDF on maximum and how those products were going to be complete failures, and how everyone needed a keyboard on their phones and how the iPad was a terrible, terrible name, inspired by female hygiene products, etc. etc.
IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie? Can you find any reality that was distorted? Sure, Steve Jobs called the iPhone revolutionary. That's obviously a characterization based on an opinion, but that opinions seems to have held up-- before it, there were only feature phones, really, and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen) It clearly revolutionized the phone category, and created the app ecosystem. Similar things happened with the iPad.
Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs.
Most of these attacks have clear motivations-- people who bought another product who want to feel it is superior, or people who work for a competitor, or -- and this is the biggest source, I believe-- hack journalists who want to create a sensational story (I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies. After all, they've been told for year that Steve Jobs is an asshole, and, despite never showing this side of himself in public, they believe it.
[1] True because I know it to be true either because I witnessed it, or I'm more informed on the issue than Isaacson is. I've been an Apple watcher for 20 years, and I have noticed that much of what people believe about Apple is based on oft repeated myth without substantiation in fact. I remember Apple trivia fairly well, and the specifics of things that often happened before people writing about them now were out of grade school. (EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!) Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies.
You're remembering the story wrong. It wasn't about laptops, and the switch took 6 months rather than a week. What happened was that in July 2000, when the Mac G4 Cube was about to be launched, ATI accidentally pre-announced the product with their press release about their Radeon chips being used in the Cube.
Six months later it was time for another MacWorld and another set of Mac updates. All the new G4 Macs used NVIDIA graphics boards instead of ATI. This was the first time in several years that Apple wasn't using ATI GPUs at all, and people speculated that this change might be due to ATI's PR slip-up.
Your posts in support of Apple are so breathless. I don't want to go all ad hom, but this is a little...much.
In any case, as a long time Apple observer, you'll remember that the RDF was coined by Apple engineers (probably Bud Tribble, at least according to this story). It was both a characterization, an expression of admiration and, yes, of frank criticism.
"Your posts in support of Apple are so breathless. I don't want to go all ad hom, but this is a little...much."
At the time of writing, nirvana has written comments on this post totalling 3931 words, most of which defend either Apple or Jobs. Don't play chess with pigeons.
"Your posts in support of Apple are so breathless. I don't want to go all ad hom, but this is a little...much."
You're talking to the person, rather than to the point. I'm not the point.
"Steve Jobs was a man, and that's OK."
Translation: Whenever someone says something false about Steve Jobs, the only reason someone might correct them is because they're a koolaid drinking cultist who cannot tolerate the idea that Steve Jobs was anything other than the second coming of christ.
Yeah, I'm glad you didn't "go all ad hom".
Edit:
I'm sorry if this post feels like it is making you the point. It actually is not intended to be that way. I'm trying to illuminate the tactic. Just as I'm trying to illuminate a tactic in my original post, and Gruber is illuminating the tactic Issacson used to discredit Jobs. The fact that the RDF was coined during the Mac project by the Mac team was known to me, and is a very different use of the term than the popular one I'm addressing.
> Translation: Whenever someone says something false about Steve Jobs, the only reason someone might correct them is because they're a koolaid drinking cultist who cannot tolerate the idea that Steve Jobs was anything other than the second coming of christ.
Not only does that not even slightly resemble anything I wrote (let alone what I think), frankly it's a ridiculous strawman that you shouldn't even employ for rhetorical points. Do you really not see any irony in the stated purpose of your posts in this thread and the content you've filled them with?
My point was only that yes, there was a very real basis for the RDF talk, and that yes, it appears that Steve Jobs was definitely problematic to work with and for. I've had that impression for a long time, especially since reading all the Folklore stories (the treatment of Jef Raskin was particularly unfortunate, whether or not the Mac was a better product for the project changes).
My understanding is that lots of people still loved doing so.
You asked
> People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way?
They might not be here, but the stories are right there. If you have a point other than the fact that someone not me on the internet is wrong and you know because you've seen a lot of keynotes in your time, let's talk.
I'm a fan of the work of Steve Jobs. He was not a magician, though, because there's no such thing. Personally, I think lionizing him reduces his accomplishments.
As for Isaacson's book, I read a few of the excerpts as they came out and they seemed like terrible writing, so I haven't read any of it since. Same reason I skipped Twilight.
You made those points sufficiently with your citation of the origin of the term, which I didn't dispute. It is your comments about me that are problematic, and you've continued them here. Since you spend more time talking about me than the "only" point you wanted to make, I'm not ashamed of pointing it out.
"You're talking to the person, rather than to the point. I'm not the point."
You actually are an expression of the point though. Most of your posts in this topic are as exemplar of the resonance to the RDF as any I've ever seen.
Like the OP, I've been an "Apple watcher for 20 years", and it's always funny to seeing people harping on this Xerox transaction, while missing most of the actual facts.
For what's worth, Microsoft gave Xerox money too, and also hired key people like Charles Simonyi from PARC. So it wasn't exactly like the movie where Bill Gates was yelling "I got the loot Steve! I got the loot!"
Yep, that made for tv movie has really ruined the debates on how the event actually unfolded. It was a pretty terrible movie in a lot of ways and it got a lot of facts wrong.
Part of Xerox's paroblem suing Apple would have been that it got its ideas elsewhere too (e.g. Alan Kay "discovered" OO programming after reading the source code of a simula compiler; most of the GUI concepts came from Englebart's lab)
I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.)
"You don't want a radio in your portable music player" was pretty damn false. Another is "people don't want porn on their machines" - like it or loathe it, the popularity of porn is pretty clear.
There's been a few things over the years we've been told by Apple that 'aren't in our interest' or 'we don't really want', but either are things we want, or suddenly become 'you want this' right after Apple starts providing that product.
Then there's the whole walled-garden thing, which isn't really about what users want (as it is presented), but about Apple wanting to shape users' expectations into something they can make money from. One clear example of this is the mac: once upon a time it was 'any colour you want, to suit who you are!', now it's 'you get one choice, regardless of who you are!'.
Mostly the 'lies' are just regular marketing stuff (and Apple does marketing well), but to paint Jobs as some uber-honest man is doing everyone a disservice.
I've never interpreted the claims of "Reality Distortion Field" as being part of his marketing spin. I'd always read about it as a management style, that he used on his team (internally). (This seems to be backed up by his recent biography).
Perhaps in the popular press the RDF has been bandied about as a name for his marketing spin. But popular press say a lot of things...
The RDF as a management tool is not unique to steve jobs, there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief, (most cults start this way).
I'm accepting your first part for the sake of argument so we can focus on the second part:
"there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief,"
I believe your perspective is in error when you get to the part about "without any fact at all to backup this belief". I believe that Steve Jobs was certainly charismatic, and probably one of the great people at getting his team to believe in a mission-- but I don't think this is "reality distortion", nor do I believe this was "without any fact at all to backup this belief".
In fact, I believe the reason he was so good was because he did have facts-- facts that the mainstream may not have been aware of-- but that were true. The thing is, many people still dispute these facts. (Eg: "The iPad is just a big iPod touch" disputes the killer app of the iPad, but the reality of iPad sales shows that they were wrong.)
Lets take some key products where Jobs got his team to believe in a mission to make something that was significantly different:
The Macintosh, NeXTSTEP & the iPhone.
For the Macintosh:
The facts: Most computers were difficult to use. Apple had strong experience with this for the apple // which was command line based. The Mac team went to Xerox and saw some of the key technology working and saw how it was more efficient (technology that Apple had a license to with the deal). Another Fact: The Apple // was a very integrated computer for its time, but a competing company (I forget the name at the time) had gone one step further and integrated the monitor with the computer. Thus the mission of the Macintosh: An integrated computer with the footprint of a phonebook that was sold like an appliance and that anyone could use because of its GUI, was not a distortion of reality, nor did it lack "any fact at all" to back up the mission. All the key elements existed elsewhere, though of course the schedule was completely unrealistic (but back then the fact that software was always late was not as widely accepted as it is now.)
NeXTSTEP:
The facts: Unix is powerful, multi-tasking is powerful. Object Oriented Software allows for component re-use. The mission: Build a unix workstation at reasonable cost that allows for rapid application development using object oriented software. True, NeXTSTEP was the first OO operating system (like the Mac was the first real GUI) and so there was some leap of faith to think they could do it or that it could be successful, but this is not based on a distortion of reality. Pre-emptive multitasking is really useful, and OO can allow for code re-use, and in the NeXT environment (and now OS X and iOS it really is a force multiplier for developers.) I don't see how he distorted reality or the facts there-- except, again, he set a deadline for delivery based on the fact that they were a startup. The deadline was unrealistic, because software takes too long and they missed it.
The iPhone:
The facts: The phone market was a mess. People hated their phones. (I did some research in this area, and found the churn rate was something like %83 and the dissatisfaction with ones phone was something like %70, though I may have those numbers reversed.) The software market for phones was locked down by carriers. The interfaces were terrible- often just a numeric keypad and if you had a full qwerty keyboard it made the phone unwieldy. A touch interface would be better, obviously ,right? Well, Apple bought Fingerworks. They knew touch interfaces could work because Fingerworks invented them. People hating their phones, the software being locked down by carriers, bad interfaces and limited usability due to physical keyboards are all things that you can't really dispute. There was a leap of faith in believing a completely touch based phone would work, and they spent many years working on it (and the iPad project which was started earlier). And again the timing for when they thought they could ship it was unrealistic and they had to bring in engineers from the OS X side of things to make their date. Did Jobs distort reality to get the team to work on the iPhone? I don't see why we should believe that. Did he get them to work on a mission without "any facts at all" to backup the belief that it could work? I don't think so-- that the phone industry was broken was obvious to a lot of people. I myself worked on a completely voice driven phone project in the late 1990s, but stopped due to being unable to get sufficient horsepower in a battery powered device to do the voice recognition.
In all three cases the market need was pretty clear. The technology precedents were visible. Both of these are facts that back up the belief in the mission. Neither of these rely on a distortion of reality.
All projects for new products require some faith. But getting people to believe something is possible, even when it hasn't been done before, doesn't mean necessarily doing it without any fact,s and in these cases, the facts to support the project were there.
If his crime is making people believe that the software won't take as long as it actually does, I can't fault him, and to be honest, he seems to be no worse in that regard than any manager I've ever had. (many of whom were deliberate about it.)
At Microsoft, for instance, when I worked there it was common practice to name the next release of windows something like "Windows 93" so that the employees all knew it had to come out in 1993, even though management knew it wouldn't be ready til 1997. Didn't want them to slack off thinking they had 4 years to get it done!
... Okay. I'm pretty sure the "Reality Distortion Field" was coined by people on the Macintosh team[1]... To describe exactly what i was talking about with regard to Steve Jobs.
Sooo, now I just feel awkward responding to the rest of your post...
You made a specific allegation and I provided three examples with a plethora of historical and technical facts that refute your allegation. I've long been aware of where the term originated, and the common use of it is not based on that origination's meaning (it was at least in part an honorific) and I was responding to the popular use. Further, you were not using it as an honorific either, but broadening it out to a very wide audience to apply to anyone who persuades a team to believe in a mission "without any facts at all to back it", so you obviously weren't using it in the same way that the Macintosh team was, and are simply now attempting to back peddle in the face of a fairly extensive refutation of your claim.
eek, No, the awkwardness comes from empathy reading your responses. I don't quite know how to respond (in honest bafflement, not back pedalling or because I feel some how convinced otherwise).
The RDF (as coined by the Mac team) was a very specific thing meant for steve jobs. I was more expanding on the fact that it isn't a unique skill/phenomenon and others use it.
Volpe-
I apologize, as it appears I completely misunderstood what you were saying when you talked about awkwardness. Further it appears that we're not too far apart in our perspective and that you were making a characterization in general that I interpreted as specific towards jobs. I missed that you were spring boarding from what I said to a broader comment, and though you were disagreeing with what I said and making a specific comment.
I think I agree with your broader comment, and agree that in the extreme it can be a dangerous talent.
You can look up some first hand accounts about the reality distortion field from folklore.org. Andy Hertzfeld has no secret motivation or an axe to grind.
I've read it extensively. The thing is, people act as if Jobs is the second coming and is, was and always will be the same person. He was young once, just like everyone else. Back in the Macintosh era, he often would come around to another person's way of thinking without realizing he'd coopted their idea. (Or maybe he realized it and was too insecure.)
But honestly, which is the bigger reality distortion:
Jobs saying that the iPhone is "revolutionary".
Or Bill Gates saying that none of NeXTSTEP made it into OS X?
Why is Jobs confusing his opinion for reality such a crime while flat out fabrication is given a free pass?
It is far more common for people to criticize Jobs for "reality distortion" than it is for people to criticize Gate for telling lies (and Gates is almost pathalogical- for years he managed to kill companies by lying about what Microsoft was going to do.)
The problem with your statement is that Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs, his family members, and all his closest work associates and friends. His statements can't be dismissed as "lies about Steve Jobs" just because you or John Gruber don't like them or think so. What is reported in the biography come from multiple eye witness accounts of the people and events. What you are basically doing is libeling (since it is in written and not spoken word) Isaacson by accusing him without proof that he misreported events in his book. Please keep in mind that Steve Jobs specifically sought out Walter Isaacson to do the biography because he believed that he would tell the story completely and honestly, which is what Steve wanted.
"His statements can't be dismissed as "lies about Steve Jobs" just because you or John Gruber don't like them or think so."
Neither I, nor John Gruber have done so.
"What is reported in the biography come from multiple eye witness accounts of the people and events."
Really? Can you name any of these people who have witnessed none of the NeXT OS making it into OS X? Surely, there must be hundreds of Apple engineers who would have witnessed this. Surely there would be lots of corroboration. In fact, it should be obvious to any competent engineer who looks at the technical documentation about OS X or iOS.
The reality is, it is obvious to any engineer who looks at this technical documentation. The OS is completely NeXTSTEP, in fact, the classes still contain the prefix "NS" which is short for "NeXTSTEP". Its "NSScrollView" not "APScrollView" or "MCScrollView", etc.
If you review the technical literature, you'll find that OS X is more accurately described as NeXTSTEP with a Mac UI on top of it, than "Mac OS with a NeXT kernel" as Bill Gates describes it.
But maybe I'm completely delusional. I've only been working with this software for 20 years. Please, show us some of these eyewitnesses to the fact that the NeXT operating system wasn't used.
"What you are basically doing is libeling (since it is in written and not spoken word) Isaacson by accusing him without proof that he misreported events in his book."
Well, the truth is a positive defense in Libel, isn't it? The fact of the matter, as any competent engineer can confirm for you, is that OS X is essentially NeXTSTEP, evolved of course over the years, with a Mac Like UI on top. It got the menu at the top from the Mac, but it carried over the Dock from the NeXT days. The kernel, the Frameworks, the operating system, everything essential was NeXTSTEP. And most of the "Mac" things really were a new UI-- an evolution of the Mac UI called Aqua.
I don't know how many more examples to give you, but its clear that for you to believe that I'm "without proof that he misreported events in his book", you're going to have to give something more than assertion. I've cited many areas of the operating system that are direct descendants from NeXTSTEP and NOT from Mac OS. You've given none.
"Please keep in mind that Steve Jobs specifically sought out Walter Isaacson to do the biography because he believed that he would tell the story completely and honestly, which is what Steve wanted."
Yes, and I want you to please keep in mind that this was not the first time that a hack reporter that Steve trusted betrayed him because he wanted to sell more units of his writing. I don't know if Isaacson was the most honest biographer-- in some areas he was quite correct, accurate and fair, though this mostly seems to be because Andy Hertzfeld did the heavy lifting.
In Steve Jobs earlier years he was more immature, and more problematic and probably a lot less likeable. Notice also that you've not heard a peep from me (or Gruber) about an unfair portrayal in that time period.
The fact of the matter is that these kinds of lies-- like the claim that NeXTSTEP wasn't used, or that Apple stole from Xerox -- are repeated as articles of faith by people who wish to attack Apple. Yet they are very trivially refuted. And when refuted, the response is to pretend like the refuters are just unhappy that someone said something bad about Steve.
Well, lots of bad things were said about Steve that are true. We're not objecting to those. We're objecting to the lies.
Hell, if Steve engineered the purchase of NeXT by Apple even when NeXTSTEP wasn't useful at all, and thus had to be scrapped when building OSX (as Gates essentially alleges) that would be an example of Steve Jobs being one hell of a powerful salesman. I wouldn't even see that as something to be embarrassed about. Why would I object to that?
No, the objection is to the fact that its a lie fabricate from whole cloth, and trivially disproven. Which both I, and John Gruber have done.
There really is no other way to describe Isaacson's characterization of the relationship between NeXTStep and Mac OS X: It's false. OS X was not Mac OS with a kernel transplant — it was an evolution of NeXTStep with some accommodations for Mac users and developers. This is why you could get OpenStep programs running with little more than a recompile, but Mac programs that hadn't specifically been designed with compatibility in mind had to run in an OS 9 VM. The Finder is the most significant carry-over from OS 9 to OS X, but the OS X version was a Carbon program written completely from scratch to mimic the behavior of the OS 9 Finder because the OS was so fundamentally different. Meanwhile, NeXT's Mail, TextEdit and Preview chugged along just fine (not to mention third-party OpenStep apps like OmniWeb and Create).
One of the most frustrating examples of people telling lies about Jobs is the meme that he told an iPhone user that they were "holding it the wrong way" when they complained about the iPhone 4 antenna. What he actually said was (and this is the entire email): "Just avoid holding it that way."
Sure it's terse, but it's a long way from telling them they're doing it wrong. Jobs isn't known to be always nice and given this person's situation his suggestion is the best way to fix the problem in the short term. Apple later made amends here, too; admittedly only because people complained, but if the success of the iPhone 4 is a good indication (you can decide) this really was never really a problem.
There's not really much different between the two quotes. People were pissed because Job's response wasn't an adequate answer to their problem.
Apple talks a lot about how "well-engineered" their products are, and yes, the 4 was cool, but Job's answer seemed like something from http://thereifixedit.com. Don't hold it that way? It's a phone.
People wanted a proper response and they didn't get it until they were big enough to make a big stink about it. That's not good customer service.
In my eyes there's a huge difference, they just look the same if you don't bother to listen to what he said and don't pay attention to Apple's response in the context of the way they run their business.
It wasn't a friendly response, but it was the solution to the problem. And when they only gave out cases later after complaints (announced during a special event to talk openly about this issue, after they had taken the time to look into it themselves) it was because the only problem was the media reaction. Millions and millions of people bought and loved the iPhone 4 even after they stopped giving out free cases a few months later. They all had the option of returning it for a full refund.
How many companies do you do business with that provide this level of service, big or small? I honestly can't think of any.
Big or small? There are tonnes of small companies that provide and exceed this level of service - the one I work for (14 people) is one of them. A lot of small companies rely on very high levels of service.
Another example - a netadmin for a bank told me that the first they know about a failing hard drive - even before their own heavy monitoring picks it up - is the vendor calling them up and confirming the correct datacentre to send it to.
To say that Apple is the pinnacle of service anywhere suggests that you are either inexperienced or wilfully one-eyed.
Further, notably, the 4S for which they could have easily changed case designed if needed, uses this same essential external antenna design. I never owned a 4, but my 4S works fine.
Yes, it has two antennas and it also, unlike the iPhone 4, is both a CDMA and a GSM phone. Hence it needs multiple antennas for the different networks.
The antenna is still on the outside. You can still attenuate the signal by holding the phone with just the right death grip, as you could the iPhone 4, and every other phone on the market.
There was no problem to fix. This is a perfect example of how people spread lies -- with the help of media who wants to latch onto anything that might show controversy about Apple- to create these false impressions.
Reality: Every phone, if held in the right way, with have signal attenuation. This is basic physics.
Reality Distortion: There's a problem with the iPhone 4! It was fixed in the 4S!
What I can't understand is the persistence in constantly repeating these falsehoods, even after the truth comes out. I state the truth (the same design in the 4s) and then someone spouts the claim that it was "fixed" because the design did improve.
Well, every iPhone is going to improve on the last. That doesn't validate a false claim that the previous version was defective because it lacked future improvements!
With, critically, one important difference: it now has two cellular antennas. This way if one loses signal, say, due to being accidentally bridged, the phone switches to the other. This is why the gaps in the metal band are different between the 4 and the 4S. (Compare them.)
It's also why Consumer Reports endorsed the 4S but not the 4. Because it doesn't have the problem. Because they fixed it.
It is useless to argue with nirvana. He is like a conspiracy theorist. He made up his mind that the iPhone 4 and 4S have the same antenna design and would rather declare PC World and Consumer Reports and you anti-Apple liars rather than admit he was wrong. This is precisely how RDF works, the story that it's Apple against the world and thus anything bad said about Apple is never true and is said only by haters.
One of the most frustrating examples of people telling lies about Jobs is the meme that he told an iPhone user that they were "holding it the wrong way" when they complained about the iPhone 4 antenna. What he actually said was (and this is the entire email): "Just avoid holding it that way."
Wow. What's your take on whether Al Gore invented the Internet?
If you can look past the fact that Jobs didn't kiss the customer's ass you may realize that a CEO of a Fortune 500 company was personally responding to the customer's problem in the most effective way he could at the time.
> IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie?
Jobs said iPhone was the first phone with a full web browser.
Opera had mobile browser using proper "desktop" rendering engine (Opera Mobile, not Mini) on mobile phones before the iPhone.
Of course iPhone was the first to add capacitative touch screen and multi-touch gestures to the mix (rather than have click-to-zoom with a stylus) and that blurry line between stated "first full mobile browser" and meant "first full mobile browser that we think is really cool" is the RDF.
I've attended some Apple keynotes. My first one, I was expecting to be mesmerized. Alas, Jobs was ok. Nailed the demo, said what he was going to say, nothing more, and then left the stage. A real pro. Grade 'A', but not life changing.
I've seen RDF. Ever watch a charismatic evangelic Christian minister in action? A motivational speaker? A politician with the gift on the stump?
Reading the early stories of RDF, I have the impression the RDF (charm, seduction) referred to a one-on-one phenomenon.
As for public appearances, what distinguished Jobs from his peers is execution. Sorry fellas, but most of us geeks are introverts and shouldn't be giving demos. And sales pukes who make pitches are too often clearly full of crap.
Further, most tech pitches that I've seen required why too much suspension of disbelief. Jobs @ Apple always had a clear vision he was selling. I didn't always buy in (too bad for me). But it was never like he was pulling a con.
"Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma."
I never saw the RDF in quite that light. It always seemed to me to be a way that Jobs could convince people that something was revolutionary, earth shattering, world changing...even when it wasn't (or at best, a well executed evolution built on previous ideas). It was the pinnacle of salesmanship -- turning customers into religious followers. Something to be admired and feared.
That's why the figurative iShitinabox was such an on target joke. The idea was that Jobs could have put shit in a box, but a diminutive "i" before the name and had people lined up around the block for a week before launch ready to buy it -- all swearing that it's going to change the world.
And always, nobody in that line was ever willing to just fess up that they were camped out in front of the Apple store because Jobs told them to be there and buy his stuff. On questioning, they would all say, and perhaps even think, that it was an original idea for them to go there and stand in that line -- and that they were especially smart and clever people for having arrived at that idea by themselves -- and this cleverness is supported by the other 500 clever smart people who are camped out a week before they can actually buy iShitinabox -- or at least an amazing coincidence. They're all different(ly thinking) in exactly the same way.
And then in the months following, there'll be some segment of that buying population that will, deep down, be dissatisfied in some way with their iShitinabox, but can't quite get the mental lens in focus to really notice it because the RDF has them in its grips, and they'll flood internet forums talking about how iShitinabox is the best thing in the history of things and will fight detractors to the death -- deflecting constructive criticism, covering over product flaws, giving testimonials about how their life has changed, start marginally successful businesses around the iShitinabox that would be more successful if they also sold almost their exact same product to the other 50% of the planet that doesn't think iShitinabox is a herald of the second coming.
That is what Job's magic power was, his Reality Distortion Field.
It's not blind loyalty, that's wrong. The iProducts really are very good -- you get a damn fine product when you buy it. But it's the religious fervor that Jobs could generate, the obedience and recitation of the doctrine by Jobs -- bolstered by a tangible thing that you could point to.
What was it about Job's delivery that caused this to happen? I remember the first iPhone launch and people were lining up with stacks of thousands of dollars in cash so they could buy 20 or 30 of the phones at launch. People literally weeping in the street when the inventory was sold out and they couldn't get theirs. I've known at least a dozen people who bought every single iPod, iPhone and iPad like they were collecting Pokemon -- some even while barely making rent.
I know of at least one divorce over this phenomenon. After every keynote, my friend's husband would run out and buy pretty much one of everything that was put up for sale right after -- annihilating their savings for a new home.
I have a professor friend that literally can't control himself and spend thousands of dollars a month on subscriptions to various services and apps for his iProducts. In class, he will try and inappropriately push this stuff on his students like a born again preacher pushing the good news.
It's not a Field-of-Lies that comprised Job's Reality Distortion Field, but it's not really an innocent Field-of-Dreams either.
The primary flaw with every RDF theory is that most Apple customers have never heard Steve Jobs speak. They only know new products are coming out when they see them on the shelves or when news hits CNN or by word of mouth. And if the media and word of mouth are so resoundingly bad at reporting on tech, how are they supposed to be so good at propagating the RDF?
How in the world could the RDF be so powerful as to bamboozle users over the utility and novelty of features, when most of the people buying new Apple products don't even know what the specific features of the next product are?
That's what's so damn offensive about people trying to push the idea of the RDF, even when they try to soft-pitch the idea by saying the products themselves aren't bad.
The entire theory insists that the person who just used an iPod and iTunes for two years doesn't know a thing about their own experience. That their high opinion of Apple is driven not by their actual experience but by the magical mind powers of a person they've never heard speak. That they're objectively wrong and some person who's never used an Apple product for more than five minutes is right, as evidenced by some techno-gibberish on a spec sheet. And that when the happy Apple customer decides to try a Mac, because the iPod thing went so well and the Dell PC thing went so poorly, that the only possible rationalization is that they've been brainwashed.
There was something there. It was even acknowledged in the bowels of Apple (RDF was coined inside of Apple). I'm not sure I know entirely how it's propagated, but I have a hunch it's through people who could best be called "evangelists".
They didn't know Jobs personally. But they took time off of work to watch every keynote and try and crash the MacWorld expos. They bought every sort of device they could get their hands on since the original iMac. And they insist to their nontechnical friends that the benefits of the platform "it just works" outweigh any downside.
My nontechnical friends who have iPhones and Macs and such all seem to have gotten into the platform that way -- they all know somebody who evangelized the platform. And with the brilliant integration between the devices, once you dip a toe in, you may as well just jump in all the way.
Now it may not be Jobs' RDF that initiated this, it may be Ive's design I don't know. But there is a strange sort of pseudo-religious phenomenon there. You simply don't see this kind of behavior with any other technology.
How in the world could the RDF be so powerful as to bamboozle users over the utility and novelty of features, when most of the people buying new Apple products don't even know what the specific features of the next product are?
That's the question isn't it? Today the iProduct line is well known. You can guess, based on the prior pattern, that any new iProduct will be very good at what it does. It may even innovate in a few key areas and shakeup the particular vertical it launches into.
But remember when the original iPhone came out? or the iPad? I don't know of anybody who actually knew anything about them, but they sure as hell were motivated to stand in line for 8 or 9 hours to get one. Why? I sure as hell don't know. They all already had phones, what was it about the iPhone that they just had to experience. There really wasn't any prior history there, and the original phones were pretty expensive for the time. I'd even argue that to a rational observer, Apple's near death not that long before hand would dissuade somebody from spending that kind of money on a device by a company that has had a very shaky history.
So what was it that moved people to empty their bank accounts and try to buy a dozen original iPhones? The iPod didn't have that sort of mania attached to it.
Why are they all there? What would it hurt to wait a couple of days until you next swung by the mall? Why are they hi-fiving and jumping up and down like they just won the lottery? What great thing did they just accomplish?
Remember, at this point in time (June 2007) all they know they've accomplished is to wait in line to buy a phone by a not very successful computer company who's other non-computer devices were by and large complete flops (sans the iPod). Remember the Apple printers? Newton, Pippin, the Quick Take, the Hi-fi? In June of 2007, Apple was rumored to be up-for-sale (with Google a possible buyer), the stock wasn't performing well.
Outside of the keynote and some coverage in the major media, there was literally no information on this device up to this point. Nobody in that line had ever used one, most had probably never seen one in real life, there were no owner testimonials, early reviews weren't exactly glowing, this could have just been a weird Apple curiosity like the Quick Take.
But all of these people, at sites all around the U.S. lined up in massive groups to buy, site unseen, and hi-five each other, over a device that they already pretty much owned as far as they knew.
The RDF is amazing, it's real and it speaks to its power that those most affected by it seem to not even be aware of its existence.
Maybe because it's a 'social event', like lining up to buy concert tickets, or a new video game, or going shopping on black friday, or getting to an amusement park early to be first in line for their favorite roller coaster.
Regular people do those sorts of things for products and experiences all the time and no-one feels a need to invent an "RDF" to explain it.
If you want to say "Jobs was persuasive" in meetings, that's one thing. What people who've worked at Apple and seen keynotes comment on and call an RDF is basically that. There is no doubt that he was a charismatic guy who prepared and presented well. But that's a far cry from saying it's at all reasonable to assert that his charisma motivates any statistically significant slice of people to buy Apple products without any regard for their quality or value.
I don't understand how Steve Job's personal charisma affects how majority of Apple customers feel about their products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, majority of Apple's customers don't go around looking for Steve Jobs (if they know the name in the first place - before he passed away of course) videos and sales pitches.
(RDF or NOT) --> (People around SJ) -/-> (Average Apple customer)
Well, Steve Jobs shaped the image of Apple as a company and it's products, and ensured things worked the way he wanted them to, right or wrong, from the inside out.....
There's a reason people go nuts over most apple products, and it's not because Steve jobs gets up on stage, and it's not because of technical specifications.... it's because he managed to setup the company to produce and market products that carried a bit of that magic with them for some reason. The packaging, the styling, etc...... we can argue that a box is just a box, but I can't help but notice when I give someone an iPod for christmas or something the fascination they have with simply opening the box. They start delicately examining the box and protecting it, usually keeping it afterwards for no explicable reason, even before getting to the product at hand.
So a box is more than just packaging obviously... if it has that effect on people, it bolsters the brand..... pretty simple.
The great thing about humans in groups - once you are charming enough to sell the right 10-20% of a population on your own, with luck, other people will soon start to copy them, and pretty soon you are the Catholic church, or Facebook, or Apple.
You mean 10-20% of Apple customers were exposed to personal interactions with Steve Jobs? I'm not sure on that.
Example: Apple had almost spent nothing on adverts or anything in India until a year (or two) ago. And yet the iPod was super duper popular. (Other products not as much as for the average Indian the price of the product + 30% tax by the govt. on the import puts them out of reach.)
The millions of Apple customers today have little in common with the tiny hardcore group of Mac users who were hanging on for dear life back in the late 1990s. For those people, Jobs was the savior.
The "Shitinabox" thing dates back to the Mac Cube, which actually did sell well for a couple months after release. (Presumably mostly because it was Steve Jobs Approved.) I think it was popularized by John Dvorak.
Probably. But today's Apple isn't built on those hardcore Mac users. I wasn't one of them. If I go back in time, I would prefer XP over what Apple was shipping in 2002. I only have Apple stuff _after_ they became good again. (Too young to have had a chance to buy the originals - Apple II et al.) OS X is UNIX - love that - and it has nice proprietary apps which to me add lot of value to everyday life.
Didn't the FBI background check on Jobs conclude that he was prone to not being forthright and honest with a tendency to distort reality? I don't think they got winged over by charisma.
"IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie?"
I'm sure it will be rationalized as bad information or somesuch; but - open sourcing Facetime. The RDF is more of an exaggeration of the truth to the limit of the suspension of disbelief. If you call a product "Magical", is it not silly? What if the people that built the product actually believe it?
You seem to be a bigger fan of Apple than Gruber is, to the point of always accusing people of hounding Apple, I wonder what topics you're critical of him about.
>(EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!)
In one earlier post you were claiming Xerox didn't invent the GUI, and that Apple did, and now you're saying it was properly licensed? If you're accusing others of thinking one-sidedly, you need to look in the mirror.
>Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
The biggest concession from Microsoft was that they made IE and MS Office for Mac, which kept Apple afloat for enough time to develop and launch OS X.
>was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
What? Why would Apple lose billions a year for $150 million? That too wasn't a settlement but gave away actual shares of the company. If what you claim is true then Apple's management did a very crappy job and must be sued. And you say RDF doesn't exist. Like the Matrix, the ones under it's influence do not know they are in an RDF :)
On the contrary, I think your point is very relevant to the issue. One of the most relevant responses. I would like to point out that I'm not claiming that Steve Jobs never lied, or that he didn't use distraction-- a famous example being the claim that Apple was not working on an ereader[1] because "people don't read anymore". Many people think this is a lie , but I disagree. People don't read as much as they did in the past, and thus obviously if Apple were to do something in that space they'd have to do something other than replicating the traditional "reading" experience. You can call that a distraction... or you can claim he was wrong because you have stats that show people are reading more now than they ever have (of physical books) but at best you'd have him with wrong facts.
However, I do wish you'd been specific about what statements about FaceTime you consider to be a lie. Now I'm forced to guess. The only issue about FaceTime that I can guess would be controversial was the claim that the protocol was going to be made open or a standard, or that something might be open sourced. (I'm thinking it was the former.)
I don't think this was a lie, but an error. I suspect that this was probably Steve Jobs idea and a decision he made at the relatively last minute which turned out to be problematic either because FaceTime uses technology that Apple had licensed, and thus couldn't open source or a protocol that was licensed and thus Apple couldn't standardize. Or, it may be that they are in the process of doing this, possibly with some standards body, and are mired in bureaucracy?
I really don't know what happened (I don't even know the specifics of the alleged lie).... but in order for there to be a lie, I think there needs to be more than just saying something that is not correct.
There are lots of sources of error- misremembering, misunderstanding, misbelieving, or misspeaking. There needs to be an intent to deceive for it to be a lie, in my book.
This is a positive defense of Bill Gates too-- was he simply in error? Did he think that the Mac UI which did make it into OS X was the "real technology" and that the "kernel" of NeXTSTEP was the entire Cocoa frameworks? In that viewpoint you could say that what Bill Gates said is strictly true, though the result of that-- Isaacson thinking that the NeXT acquisition was a waste of money other than getting Jobs, is pretty deceptive.
Its possible Bill Gates is old and wasn't thinking clearly, or was deceiving himself,, or Isaacson is completely misrepresenting what he said.
[1] Note that to date, Apple has never released a Kindle competitor. It has released very different things, the iPhone and iPad. They do allow you to read books, of course, with iBooks, but Apple wasn't chasing the Kindle, and the question was whether Apple was going to compete with the kindle.
We don't know, because Apple never said another thing about FaceTime being submitted as an open protocol. Someone might even think they made the empty promise just so they wouldn't get flack about another proprietary chat service. But who knows... Apple should have addressed it one way or another.
Just as I suspected, this point is rationalized away with speculation. He said:
“And we’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”
The reason this rings so hallow is because it is so outside the MO of Apple. If Apple creates something they think is really great (and customers do too) it becomes part of what sets Apple apart. Apple doesn't license their technology, they use it as a key differentiator. The only real contribution Apple has made, in my mind, to open standards is webkit; and they built that on top of KHTML so I'm not sure they really had a choice.
Yeah, I've heard that response and I guess I don't know how I feel about it still; I don't see what prevents him from keeping his assurances or I guess, why he wouldn't? I've seen others point out that "standards" got a lot of support as they were bashing Adobe. (Frankly I also think there probably would have been a good FaceTime implementation on Android and it would impact the uniqueness/Appleness of the feature). I guess I'm speculating, maybe inappropriately.
Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way? I am not. I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.)
For instance, remember the introduction of the iPhone? How about the introduction of the iPad? Everyone here should be old enough to remember one or both of these keynotes. Surely Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" would be deployed to maximum effect at such keynotes-- and after both of them I remember much derision and claims that Jobs had the RDF on maximum and how those products were going to be complete failures, and how everyone needed a keyboard on their phones and how the iPad was a terrible, terrible name, inspired by female hygiene products, etc. etc.
IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie? Can you find any reality that was distorted? Sure, Steve Jobs called the iPhone revolutionary. That's obviously a characterization based on an opinion, but that opinions seems to have held up-- before it, there were only feature phones, really, and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen) It clearly revolutionized the phone category, and created the app ecosystem. Similar things happened with the iPad.
Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs.
Most of these attacks have clear motivations-- people who bought another product who want to feel it is superior, or people who work for a competitor, or -- and this is the biggest source, I believe-- hack journalists who want to create a sensational story (I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies. After all, they've been told for year that Steve Jobs is an asshole, and, despite never showing this side of himself in public, they believe it.
[1] True because I know it to be true either because I witnessed it, or I'm more informed on the issue than Isaacson is. I've been an Apple watcher for 20 years, and I have noticed that much of what people believe about Apple is based on oft repeated myth without substantiation in fact. I remember Apple trivia fairly well, and the specifics of things that often happened before people writing about them now were out of grade school. (EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!) Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)