For anyone struggling Steve Jobs: America's Greatest Failure:

[JG55]

Found this article and for anyone who is struggling or who has failed at something, it gives you hope that you too can succeed when you see people rise from their failures.

Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure

Glory is sometimes born of catastrophe.

Steve Jobs’s announcement that he is stepping down as CEO of Apple is not surprising. He’s a very sick man; and running the world’s largest market-cap technology firm can’t be easy for someone with pancreatic cancer and who-knows-what other ailments.

Lots of digital ink will be spilled about Jobs in the coming days, most of it focusing on his truly marvelous successes.

It’s better to focus on his failures.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, boneheaded failure

Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.

Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more.

Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.

I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.

All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

— Nick Schulz is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of its journal, The American.

[Guest bkelm18]

Love him or hate him, Jobs changed the world with his products and innovations. I'm a huge fan of Apple and am sad to see him go.

[willis68]

That is a very cool article, thanks for posting this

[Guest db99wj]

Nice article and so true. Had a discussion with some guys two days ago at a football practice about failure and competition. Today our kids participate in sports so they can learn, develop and have fun. Notice something missing? Yep, compete. There are no awards, no rankings, no trophy's...oh wait, there are trophy's, but you don't have to win a single game to get one of those these days. Kids today are not set up to fail, they don't know what it means therefore they don't know how to bounce back, learn, become better, and then successful. We are building a future that doesn't know what failure is and it could be tragic when it happens in the real world to many of these kids. Have you ever been watching your kid do something and you know it's not going to work, but you let them keep going until they....fail? Then you show them what they did wrong, what they should have done, and helped them learn from that mistake? I have and do with my kids, but many out there don't. /end rant.

Great story, I hope him all the best and that he beats his health issues.

[Jonnin]

I hope he has not taken a turn for the worse. I don't like his policys (the encrypted music stuff, the anti free speech internet, and so on) but I respect him a lot as a pioneer in the computer industry and he has a great attitude (he is known to respond to emails in person, for example, and when he fails, he tries again and learns from mistakes). I remember "next", but not lisa. We had a bunch of next machines, it was some sort of oddball setup that supposedly could run both microsoft and unix software and the gui was unlike either one at the time, it was a difficult to use system. And of course I remember the IIE, never had one but it was in the schools and other kids had them. I had a typewriter, lol -- my parents couldnt see any use for a computer (and to be honest I just wanted to play games on it). I hope he lives to be over 100 without a relapse, but this news makes me worry about him...

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Not speaking ill of the sick-- Jobs has had many accomplishments.

Mac was just a stripped-down Lisa version 2. If they hadn't spent the money designing the Lisa then they would have had to spend the same money designing the Mac. Software mostly, not the hardware design costs especially.

At first if you wanted to program for Mac, you could only do so if you owned a Lisa.

Modern MacOS is just Next OS improved and refined. Jobs brought his crew from Next and over the years gradually replaced all the old MacOS with Next OS. Jobs engineers were the top dogs and the previous apple engineers were marginalized and gradually edged out "at the top".

After Jobs left apple sure apple had occasional hard financial times, but the programming documentation was superb. Much finer than it has ever been since he returned.

The motorola 68K chip family was a strong fine thang. It also powered excellent early OS's such as Amiga and Atari ST. The 68K was a pleasure to program which I think explains the "coincidence" that the best GUI OS's of the era ran on 68K.

Apple abandoned the 68K line because Motorola was losing the CPU speed war with intel. First for PPC chip, then later for Intel.

It was a technical accomplishment to gradually migrate from old MacOS to Unix+NextOS while also migrating across two new mutually-incompatible CPU's. There has been recent scuttlebutt about Macs migrating again to the same chip families which power iPhones and iPads. I sure hope not.

But think about it this way-- In 1984 MacOS was at least 10 years ahead of Microsoft. In 1995 MacOS remained many years ahead of Microsoft.

Though advocates may claim that Mac is still ahead of MS, I program both and IMO they have been about "on par" for some years. During the era of MacOS 9 and early years of MacOS 10, MS was definitely ahead. MacOS9 was fabulous for dedicated single-purpose workstations but bless its pointy head, if you tried to use it as a general-duty computer it would crash constantly.

How did Mac lose a ten year long, ten year technical lead? Could it have something to do with rewriting the OS many times (many rewrites that did not even see daylight), while continually flitting between CPU families? In the years that winders programmers just kept building on their code bases running on "about the same thing" every year, Mac programmers spent a lot of their time rewriting their code over and over and over so that the same features would continue to run on Steve Jobs' latest whim of OS or hardware.

That is how you lose a 10 year technical lead-- Continuously rearranging the deck chairs rather than providing stable real improvements over the years.

Maybe without Jobs churning the tech over the years maybe apple would have gone out of business. However if it had just kept going improving on what already worked excellently, and not dooming application programmers to decades of change for the sake of change-- Then if Apple had survived until today it would probably still be 10 years ahead of MS.

[Guest bkelm18]

Not speaking ill of the sick-- Jobs has had many accomplishments.

Mac was just a stripped-down Lisa version 2. If they hadn't spent the money designing the Lisa then they would have had to spend the same money designing the Mac. Software mostly, not the hardware design costs especially.

At first if you wanted to program for Mac, you could only do so if you owned a Lisa.

Modern MacOS is just Next OS improved and refined. Jobs brought his crew from Next and over the years gradually replaced all the old MacOS with Next OS. Jobs engineers were the top dogs and the previous apple engineers were marginalized and gradually edged out "at the top".

After Jobs left apple sure apple had occasional hard financial times, but the programming documentation was superb. Much finer than it has ever been since he returned.

The motorola 68K chip family was a strong fine thang. It also powered excellent early OS's such as Amiga and Atari ST. The 68K was a pleasure to program which I think explains the "coincidence" that the best GUI OS's of the era ran on 68K.

Apple abandoned the 68K line because Motorola was losing the CPU speed war with intel. First for PPC chip, then later for Intel.

It was a technical accomplishment to gradually migrate from old MacOS to Unix+NextOS while also migrating across two new mutually-incompatible CPU's. There has been recent scuttlebutt about Macs migrating again to the same chip families which power iPhones and iPads. I sure hope not.

But think about it this way-- In 1984 MacOS was at least 10 years ahead of Microsoft. In 1995 MacOS remained many years ahead of Microsoft.

Though advocates may claim that Mac is still ahead of MS, I program both and IMO they have been about "on par" for some years. During the era of MacOS 9 and early years of MacOS 10, MS was definitely ahead. MacOS9 was fabulous for dedicated single-purpose workstations but bless its pointy head, if you tried to use it as a general-duty computer it would crash constantly.

How did Mac lose a ten year long, ten year technical lead? Could it have something to do with rewriting the OS many times (many rewrites that did not even see daylight), while continually flitting between CPU families? In the years that winders programmers just kept building on their code bases running on "about the same thing" every year, Mac programmers spent a lot of their time rewriting their code over and over and over so that the same features would continue to run on Steve Jobs' latest whim of OS or hardware.

That is how you lose a 10 year technical lead-- Continuously rearranging the deck chairs rather than providing stable real improvements over the years.

Maybe without Jobs churning the tech over the years maybe apple would have gone out of business. However if it had just kept going improving on what already worked excellently, and not dooming application programmers to decades of change for the sake of change-- Then if Apple had survived until today it would probably still be 10 years ahead of MS.

Apple isn't just about programming and computers. iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Game changers. Pure and simple. That's why the man got to where he is. As the article stated, he didn't give you what you wanted, he gave you what you never knew you wanted.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Apple isn't just about programming and computers. iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Game changers. Pure and simple. That's why the man got to where he is. As the article stated, he didn't give you what you wanted, he gave you what you never knew you wanted.

I'm not saying bad about the man, but I don't want an iPod, iPhone or iPad. I didn't know I didn't want one till Jobs made them then I looked at them and didn't see anything especially desirable about the products.

But you have a point that he apparently gave a lot of people what they didn't know they wanted.

[G27]

I'm not saying bad about the man, but I don't want an iPod, iPhone or iPad. I didn't know I didn't want one till Jobs made them then I looked at them and didn't see anything especially desirable about the products.

But you have a point that he apparently gave a lot of people what they didn't know they wanted.

Individual decisions don't determine what is 'game changing' - it's what makes the general public move. Jobs did that, even if some individuals rejected his vision...

One of my all-time favorite speeches was by Jobs: Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)

[greenego]

Someone once said to be successful you must double your failures. Jobs is a good example of this.

[Guest bkelm18]

Individual decisions don't determine what is 'game changing' - it's what makes the general public move. Jobs did that, even if some individuals rejected his vision...

One of my all-time favorite speeches was by Jobs: Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)

That is an excellent speech. Thanks for posting that.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Individual decisions don't determine what is 'game changing' - it's what makes the general public move. Jobs did that, even if some individuals rejected his vision...

Agreed lots of stuff is game changing. MTV. Rap Music. Monopolistic software marketing schemes. Pad computers with sparse features and giant buttons. MP3 players that don't work well except paired with a super-annoying iTunes app on the host machine.

Steve had/has a powerful reality distortion field. Amazingly strong. Legendary. Many pad computers had failed miserably before the iPad. Nobody expected Jobs to be able to peddle iPads except the apple true-believers. Steve could have put the Apple name, a more-stylish design, and big buttons on sparse-featured applications, and sold heck out of any of the failed predessors made by the other companies. It is a talent, fer sure.

[Guest WyattEarp]

Steve Jobs is to Apple, what Bill Gates is to Microsoft. both have done tremendous things for the technology industry, but life is not all about success, with it comes many trials, errors, and failures. but it's what you learn from them, that makes the greatest impact on your life.

MP3 players that don't work well except paired with a super-annoying iTunes app on the host machine.

I hate iTunes. i don't like having to sync an ipod to itunes, just to transfer music. and then if i want to do it on another computer like my laptop instead of my desktop, it wipes all my music off. should be able to sync to more than 1 itunes.

i use it anyway, because an ipod is the only type of mp3 player that will connect to my car stereo so I dont have to change cd's but iTunes was a terribly thought out piece of software, but I can't say it's a failure because it's rather popular.

i just wish with the ipod you could copy the music directly to the hard drive on your ipod by using Finder or Windows Explorer to do it just like you would a normal hard drive. but maybe that's why i'm not a CEO and a multi-millionaire.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Yeah, call it luck or skill or perseverance, but most companies get ONE chance to make a mistake and then they are history. At best a minor footnote on some random obscure web page describing defunct computer companies. Failure can be educational if you survive long enough to benefit from the education but in general failure is highly over-rated.

Somewhere around 1995 I started moving my music into mp3. In a couple of years had about 30 gb of music collection arranged in a directory structure useful to me. I don't have a large music collection and don't buy much new music. It very gradually grows over the years but remains mostly neglected except occasional spurts of interest because I get tired of repeatedly hearing the same music. If I hear a song on a routine basis, regardless how good the music is, it puts me to sleep. Literally. Just can't keep my eyes open. Unless I turn it off it is nappy time.

I would play my collection over the years on many platforms and programs. If I want to hear an album just tell the player to play all the songs in the album's directory. I don't need mp3 tags and references and ratings. If I didn't like the song I would have long ago erased it. Lots of albums brought in from vinyl and denoised and de-clicked, with no tags at all except song and artist name in the filename. It is so tedious doing a good job importing from vinyl that it is a PITA to also laboriously add tags to all the songs.

Apple is charmed somehow. The average person seems unaware that any other company ever made digital music players. Wife is a technophobe and she only likes classical music mostly. She loves to listen to the same tunes repeatedly and has her favorite old warhorse pieces. One time I showed her an iPod and her eyes glazed over. She finally wanted an mp3 player but not one "complicated" like an iPod.

Got her a little Phillips player not much bigger than a postage stamp. Cheap. Loading it up was easy. Just plugged in the USB and drag over the "classical" directory from my/our collection containing all the sub-folders of classical artists and composers. In the tiny little screen and few buttons she can easily find individual songs or play specific albums by playing a directory, or just play a directory at one or more levels to get random play of an artist, composer or genre. No iTunes, no playlists, no tags required.

The French company Archos made some earlier mp3 players. The hardware may or may have not been durable enough. The boxes failed after a few years each, but I used them a lot more often than the current iPod touch. Had the typical 5 button circular control and about 8 line green monochrome display. Same deal, just drag the entire collection onto the player one time, then play whatever I like easy navigating the directory structure in text mode.

Importing my long-tweaked directory structure into iTunes, the first thing the dern program does is discard ALL of my directory information. And because most of my music doesn't contain the silly tags, it is almost impossible to properly sort the tunes into any sane form after the directory information has been discarded. It is just impossible to drag the master directory of tunes into the iPod and then play a sub-directory. Arrgh!

In previous mp3 players or most computer player software, ferinstance if I'm in a mood for random playback of all the songs in the /music/rock/surf directory, I just navigate to that directory, turn on random, and click play. But iTunes and the iPod is such a genius that I have to laboriously select all the tunes in the surf category in iTunes and make a playlist and send the playlist to the iPod. What a stroke of genius to make such a simple task so labor-intensive!

It gets worse. If I happen across some new cheez surf music and add it to iTunes and sync it to the iPod, the old playlist won't play the new-added songs, so you have to re-make the playlist if you want the new songs to be included in the random playback! Just a stroke of genius front to back.

Of course if I had bought every single song in the 30 GB new from the Apple store (assuming the more obscure stuff was available for sale), then all the tunes would have tags and iTunes would work marginally better.

====

Apple affects other company's design decisions. In the period between XP and Vista, MS seemed to develop an "inferiority complex" about Apple GUI appearance. So MS began more and more to copy apple gui features into Vista and Win 7 which I consider counter-productive. If you don't like the look'n'feel, you don't even have a choice because you get about the same thing from MS as well. MS has kept fouling up windows media player to the point that it is nearly as unpleasant to use as iTunes. Windows Live Mail is a textbook case of a program that will eat yer entire screen while still only displaying half the text of an email and only about 10 email headers.

Features such as huge window title bars and borders or large windows with only a few giant buttons. Space-wasting toolbars with giant colorful icons. After you decorate a window with all that fluff, there is barely any screen left to display the actual content-- The stuff you want to work on which is the whole purpose of having the computer to begin with.

MacOS 9 was almost a pinnacle of a truly-useful GUI. The menu bar was "big enough". A simple drop-down menu that only takes a few pixels collapsed, served the same purpose of a space-wasting gaint taskbar, and window title bars and borders looked fine but only wasted a few pixels of screen.

Back then I could run photoshop or digital performer on dual 1024X768 19" CRT or later dual 1280x960 19" LCD monitors and have plenty of screen space. The old CRT monitors had to be mounted a few feet away at the same plane as the studio speakers so they wouldn't mess up the stereo image, which was sometimes squint-city. But the LCD monitors could be placed right under my nose right behind the computer keyboard, and the monitor speakers were mounted higher-up "upside down" with tweeters at ear level and the woofers above the tweeters, so the audio would blast over the top of the LCD monitors without much audio coloration.

Sometimes digital performer would get stacked several windows deep but there wasn't much trouble seeing enough data to get the job done, in good detail.

Nowadays with the giant window borders and huge controls, I feel crowded running dual 24" 1920X1200 monitors right in my face. Am pretty certain that on MacOSX or Win 7 that the GUI takes up so much space that I can see LESS actually useful info than in the old days with smaller monitors and less screen eye-candy.

It is a dual-edged sword because once a user becomes accustomed to giant gui features, it looks weird to run an older program with smaller gui elements on a modern big screen. But you sure can see more work data than nowadays. I've been trying to justify buying dual 27" or 30" 2560X1440 or 2560X1600 monitors just to be able to see adequate content IN SPITE of all the GUI eye candy. But it is probably hopeless. If the typical user goes to 30" monitors, then apple and MS will just make the icons, window borders, buttons and toolbars even-more-gianter to make sure you still can't see any more data than a 17" monitor used to be able to display!

[Guest nicemac]

Complicated iPod? That is the first time I have ever heard that word used to describe an iPod…

Microsoft started copying the Mac OS in Vista and Windows 7? The photocopiers started in Redmond in 1984 and have never shut off…

Lion has full screen mode - no menus whatsoever.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Complicated iPod? That is the first time I have ever heard that word used to describe an iPod…

Microsoft started copying the Mac OS in Vista and Windows 7? The photocopiers started in Redmond in 1984 and have never shut off…

Lion has full screen mode - no menus whatsoever.

Wife is a technophobe. Complicated is her description. My description-- "Numerous features that I don't want but absent the features that I do want".

The copying goes both directions. Many "whiz bang" features in the first iterations of MacOSX were copies of good ideas in Winders. Unless apple just "spontaneously re-invented the wheel" several years after MS originally added them to winders. Mouse wheel. Multiple mouse buttons. Task bar. Right-click functionality. etc.

Granted MS copies a lot over the years, but it would be nice if MS would have the good sense to only copy the good stuff. As far as a compact GUI, XP using the "classic" window appearance was a pretty compact and usable GUI. Not as compact as MacOS 9 but close. Vista was more difficult to customize compact, and I haven't much even tried on Win 7, except making the start menu as compact as possible.

Edited August 29, 2011 by Lester Weevils

[G27]

Apple isn't charmed - Steve jobs is.

I mean, he got fired from Apple, the company he started with Woz, so he started his own company, NeXT, which Apple ended up buying back from him for hundreds of millions of dollars. He also started a little company called Pixar after he was fired from Apple and via the successes they've had is now the largest single shareholder of Disney stock (some 7% of the company).

He almost literally has the Midas touch. Those who think Apple will continue to have the same success without him are fooling themselves.