In Praise of Steve Jobs

Note: This was adapted from a really long comment at althouse.com based on her post here: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/who-has-had-as-much-impact-on-business.html

I've read a lot of nonsense today about Steve Jobs. A man that brilliant deserves a little more respect from people -- many of whom may not have been alive in 1976 -- who are discounting what he did for Apple and technology in general.

For those of you saying Apple had zero impact on your life, yadda yadda, then you're not in publishing, marketing or graphic design. But every print or motion advertisement you've seen since 1979 was made with the assistance, if not solely on, a Mac. But first Mac -- following on Apple IIe -- opened up a world of personal computing before the PC world adopted those initials. That is, just a short few years after the CEO of IBM stated that the ENTIRE MARKET for computers added up to maybe 5 users, Apple proved that there was a viable HOME market for computing. The elegance and sophistication and power in the Mac design (aesthetic and operational) revolutionized many industries.

Every ad agency, art director, and small publisher adopted the Mac system because it was built to do tasks that the glorified typewriters sold by IBM just weren't suited well for. Creative ideas blossomed across the land by people using Macs. It doesn't matter if their market share was small, it was highly influential. And seeding schools with Macs was another brilliant stroke during Jobs first tenure as CEO.

Now, many comments here reflected the "sure they had great design but" argument. Your eliding a lot of unbelievable value with that big but in there! If you don't think Jobs mattered to Apple then you didn't see how they floundered without him, even though the designers had great ideas: Newton was a tablet computer long before the iPad but didn't have the elegance and power-packed features of the later iteration. It came out when Apple was rudderless. The kind of creative teams developed there needed a strong hand, a man with a good eye. Steve Jobs was that man.

And Apple welcomed him back in 1996 just in time to take advantage of powerful new chipsets and bigger brighter screens were being developed, as wireless systems were being designed and people were experimenting with hooking television and cable to their computers.

Sure it's easy today to look back and think the iMac and iPod and iPhone and iPad followed a natural progression. Maybe you even think anyone could have done it, but that's not the case. It would not have been this way but for Steve Jobs. Going against the norm for marketers, who are slavishly devoted to decoding customer signals and addicted to focus groups, Jobs lays it out in the quotes Ann posted today. They built the machine for tomorrow. Customers liked it. People bought it. They packed as much forward-thinking technology into the iPhone as they could, even things other phone makers didn't think of. Apps? People here have said, in so many words, that tell the people what to buy and they'll do it. Well, that's a clever, if cynical, way to phrase it. But it's completely wrong. Sometimes the customer DOESN'T know what he wants until he sees something and involuntarily says, "Wow!"

Steve Jobs knew how to organize an enormous multidimensional company made up of brilliant people and get them to make things that make people go wow. And, he did it in a way that can't be written about without using the word elegant. It's true.

If you're here today reading this comment then you know more about computers than your grandparents ever did. They have changed your life. And many of the things we use -- graphical user interfaces (as opposed to DOS commands), a mouse, a CPU separate from the screen and keyboard, a flat screen, app stores, huge catalogs of music )legally!) at your fingertips -- all those things are Apple inventions that were adapted to PC design over time.

Sure, Steve Jobs is not a revolutionary like Henry Ford, but after assembly lines, standardization and charcoal briquets what did Henry do? Steve Jobs kept going, kept pushing technology into directions that people needed but didn't yet know they wanted. It's easy to make fun of or even miss, because like any consummate master he made it look easy, even inevitable. But all these things were not inevitable and Apple is second to only Exxon Mobile in value right now, because it was led by a one-of-kind visionary named Steve Jobs.

The Civility Project

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/02/democrats_also_need_a_presidential_primary_in_2012_110793.html

Given your extremely uncivil rhetoric in the article linked above, I have only one question. How's that Civility Project going, Froda?

MJB Wolf

Lessons Learned from the Wiener Debacle

[Cough]

Tyranny of the Union Minority

I was reading something on Ricochet yesterday on American exceptionalism (and would link to it but their "search function" at Ricochet can't find an article with that term in it and I have to peck this out and get working) about which the comments veered into a discussion of why Conservatives cry about curtailed Liberty when they really mean we don't like taxes. The commenter (again, sorry I can't link to the idiots at Ricochet) went on to deride the conservative position on over-regulation, minimizing it as a "little red tape."

And all this got me thinking -- which is the real point of the geniuses who started Ricochet -- about how many Americans never try to start a business in this hostile environment (I live in California) or are aware of just how encroaching the administrative state really is. And I'm not blaming Obama for things that came before him, but he has taken this tendency of the state to administer business to death to a whole new level. And he has strong allies in this with unions, both public and private.

Maybe like most Americans, you are not aware that Obama's recess-appointed majority on the NLRB has stepped in to tell Boeing where they can and can't do business now. Maybe you didn't know that the Feds are killing the fishing industry in this country. But it is happening, the same way Obama is strangling the last vestiges of oil exploration and recovery in the USA -- even after a federal judge declared his moratorium illegal. (His contempt of court decisions is a rips subject for an intrepid reporter who wants to write real news.)

His contempt for free market principles is what most disturbs me about Obama. But what is harming America is this administrations all-out fealty to Big Labor -- which ain't so big anymore. At the behest of 7% of the work force, Obama is enforcing directives and stifling business. A small, nefarious minority of working Americans many of whom were coerced into joining their union, are wreaking havoc on the rest of us.

This tyranny of the minority cannot stand, and the majority will eventually vote out politicians who hew to the same line as president Obama.

Every Lie the Left Has Told...

The following is an excerpt from the Best of the Web column (WSJ Online) by James Taranto, from yesterday:

It's quite striking the way almost every lie the left ever told about the Tea Party has turned out to be true of the government unionists in Wisconsin and their supporters:

• Extreme rhetoric. The Wisconsin Republican Party has produced what Mediaite.org calls an "incredibly effective" video juxtaposing liberal complaints about allegedly extremist Tea Party rhetoric with unionist signs likening Gov. Walker to Hitler and other dictators. Left-wing journalists are making similar invidious comparisons: "Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, but Might Be Silenced in Wisconsin" read the headline of a Washington Post column by Harold Meyerson last week. The other day on CNN we saw scenes of a Madison crowd chanting, "Kill the bill"--which was said to be violent and invidious a year ago, when "the bill" was ObamaCare.

• Violence. Blogress Ann Althouse, a state employee based in Madison, posted a video of municipal salt trucks blowing their horns in support of the unionists. A YouTube commenter responded (quoting verbatim), "whoever video taped this has no life and should be shot in the head." Unlike Frances Fox Piven, Althouse has never advocated violence, but don't expect the Times to give this the kind of coverage it gave Piven's claims that she had received threatening emails.

• Partisan AstroTurf. That's the Beltway term referring to a fake grassroots movement. Politico reported last week that "the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America arm--the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign--is playing an active role in organizing protests." A blogger at the OFA website, BarackObama.com, writes: "To our allies in the labor movement, to our brothers and sisters in public work, we stand with you, and we stand strong." We've also received emails from MoveOn.org, which says it's holding a pro-unionist rally outside our offices later this afternoon. Sorry, MOO, we're working at home today.

• Refusal to accept election results. Although Republicans have a majority in the Wisconsin Senate, Democrats have fled the state, taking advantage of the body's rules to deny the majority a quorum. The Indianapolis Star reports that Democrats from the Indiana House are employing the same tactic. Even Barack Obama, when he was an Illinois senator, usually voted "present."

• Stupidity. Remember "Teabonics," a photo album of misspelled Tea Party signs? The unionists can't spell any better--and some of them are teachers! Althouse got one photo of what we think is a woman holding a sign that reads " 'Open for business' = Closed for Negotiatins [sic]." Also, some of the teachers' tactics--in particular, fraudulently calling in sick and exploiting other people's children by enlisting them as protesters--seem not only unethical but calculated to repel the public. One blessing of low standards for public school teachers is that it ensures many of them are not bright enough to stage an effective protest.

The one exception: So far we haven't seen any evidence of racism by the Wisconsin unionists. But we're watching for it.

Greed of Public Employees Knows no Bounds

As events unfold in Wisconsin this week, it is good that people have a chance to see how the other half lives. And by half, I mean the small percentage of people employed by government entities around this country. Last Fall we heard about the city of Bell near Los Angeles, in which currupt officials voted themselves million dollar pay & benefits packages, often while collecting pensions from other municipalities.

Now we have the tableau in Packerland. Teachers leaving classrooms empty for a week so they can circle the capitol in Madison likening the new governor to Hitler. When 20% of their fellow Americans are un- or under-employed, they keep demanding ever larger pay and benefits packages. While we in California were recoiling from the Bell scandal, Wisconsin teachers were suing their health care provider to cover Viagra.

And when you ask them how much you should give,
The only answer is more, more more!

Now that the eyes of the world have turned to Wisconsin and the teachers union realizes how disgusting their display of pique appears to the very people who pay their way the complaint has turned to, "We already agreed to pay more for benefits, but [governor] Walker wants to break up the union."

Really? Where have we heard that kind of poorly constructed argument before? Oh, yes. It is the free market as death knell scenario, isn't it? As in, "No one will let a left winger have a radio show like Rush."

The argument has no merit when it comes to talk radio and it has no merit applied to unions. You see, one of Walker's reforms is to force the union to collect their own dues and stand in (secret ballot) elections yearly to be re certified. They call this union-busting. What it is is choice.

Ooh, the c word! You see, the "pro choice" party is vehemently anti-choice when it comes to any activity other than exterminating a womb inhabitant. No choice in schools, no choice in union, and they'd love to limit ballots to Democrat-only too. The problem in that plan is us. Specifically, there are more of us than there are them. And more specifically, there are more of us forced to part of them (unions) who would LOVE the choice of withholding dues and certification. LOVE IT!

I've been a union guy. I've been a teacher. And the union never did a thing for me, ever. Except take money out of my check. I might get some money back if I live to be 72, but it will be a pittance. (By the way, what would these union thugs in Madison say if the Governor raised their retirement age to 72? Huh?)

So these Greek-like dramas playing out in Madison are a lesson to us all. The naked greed on display is sickening. Usually, it is liberals calling conservatives greedy -- because we like to keep some of the money we earn. So this week and the days to come provide glorious lessons in who the real greedy grabbers are:

• School budgets have risen faster than inflation and enrollment combined over the last 20 years
• More children leave high school unable to read or write at a six-grade level in Milwaukee than in any other large city
  
• Private sector employees have taken pay cuts, and seen their budgets decimated by increased medical costs and higher co-pays
• No one I know has seen a raise larger than 1.5% in the last 5 years
  

So watch the Wisconsin Show with this in mind. You are witnessing the grand beginning of the death knell of Public Sector unions. Therefore, you will see a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth. And you will see the thugs and teachers (groups that overlap some) make every excuse under the sun as to why their unions should not have to seek the consent of those it purports to lead. They know they cannot win free and secret ballots. They know they've promised more than they can keep. And they know the days of leading Democrats around by the nose are nearly over.

So watch them whine and thrash and gnash their teeth. Smile if you're so inclined. For we are going to win this one. The same way my Packers won their Big Game.

MJB Wolf ones a share of the Green Bay Packers, works for a company in Wisconsin, and loves the state. But MJB hates unions. Duh!