Jobs made computers as thin as books

Jobs is a genius who made history. He not only created the history of the modern PC industry by founding Apple Computer, but also launched iPods in just 13 years after returning to Apple in 1997. , iPhone, IPad and other creative products have radically and successfully subverted the market structure of the four major industries of PC, music, movies and mobile phones, reshuffling them.

Last year, "Fortune" named Jobs the best CEO of the decade, believing that "if an entrepreneur can reshape any market, it can be regarded as a lifetime achievement, such as Henry Ford's reform of the automobile production process. However, he can Steve Jobs is the first person to change four major existing markets at the same time."

How did he do all this? What kind of wisdom does he use to continue to create the Apple legend?

Recently, Bloomberg TV aired a biography of Steve Jobs, and the famous foreign Apple information website Cult of Mac also conducted an exclusive interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley.

This is the first time John Scully has spoken publicly about Jobs since leaving Apple. The entire interview gave Jobs high praise and shared the secrets of Jobs’ creation of great products based on his own experience. He said It’s called “The Steve Jobs Methodology.” He admitted that during his tenure as Apple CEO, all design ideas came from Jobs. "All Apple products during my tenure were attributed to Steve Jobs."

Based on user experience

25 years ago When I first met Steve Jobs, he followed the same first principles, which I call "The Steve Jobs Methodology of How to Build Great Products." At that time, Steve Jobs always liked beautiful products, especially hardware. He is fascinated every time he comes to my house because I have a collection of special door locks. I once studied industrial design, and it was industrial design that connected me with Steve Jobs, not computers. I didn't know much about computers at that time, and few people in the world did. It was the beginning of the personal computer revolution, and both of us had faith in beautiful design. In particular, Jobs felt that design must start from the commanding heights of user experience.

He always looks at things from the perspective of user experience. Most product marketers today go out and do consumer surveys, asking passers-by “what do you need?” Unlike them, Jobs didn't believe in this approach. "If people don't know what a graphics-based computer is, how can I ask them what kind of graphics-based computer they want? No one has ever seen a computer like this," he said. He believes in showing people a computer The computer doesn't help it imagine the future of computers. Because it would be a leap.

Steve insists that we should start with user experience, and industrial design is a very important part of user impression. He recruited me to join Apple because he believed computers would eventually become a consumer product, which was a ridiculous idea in the early 1980s, when people thought personal computers were just smaller versions of mainframe computers. IBM sees it this way too. Some people thought that the personal computer was more like a game console, and simple game consoles that simply connected to the TV were already available. But Steve had something entirely different on his mind. He felt that computers would change the world and become what he called "bicycles for the mind," providing people with amazing functions they had never thought of. This isn't a game console, or a large computer simply getting smaller...

I remember when Steve and I went to meet Edwin Land, the co-founder of the Polaroid Company. The Doctor is one of his idols. That's when Dr. Rand was eliminated from Polaroid. He has his own laboratory in Cambridge. It was a pleasant afternoon. We were sitting in the large conference room, and the conference table was empty. Dr. Rand and Steve stared at the center of the table throughout their conversation. Dr. Land said, "I could picture what a Polaroid camera would look like. It was so real, it was as if it were in front of me before I even made it." And then Jobs said, "Yeah, I have that feeling about the Macintosh, too." Feeling."

Both of them had a knack for discovering rather than inventing products. They all say that the product has always existed, but no one could discover it. Polaroid cameras have always been around, and Macintosh has always been around, it was just a matter of when they were discovered.

Pursuing the ultimate perfection

Jobs had great judgments about the future and also pursued precision in the details of every step. He works methodically, carefully and with perfection. The difference between Jobs' methodology and others is that he always believed that the most important decision you make is not what you want to do, but what you decide not to do. He is a minimalist.

I remember that Steve Jobs’ home had almost no furniture. There was only a portrait of Einstein, whom he admired very much, a Tiffany lamp, a bed and a chair. He does not advocate owning a lot of things, but once he chooses them, he takes good care of them. Just like how careful he is about apples. This is Jobs. Starting from the user experience, he believes that industrial design should give people the feeling of playing with jewelry, rather than the feeling of playing with technical products.

When the Macintosh first appeared in front of me, it was just a series of parts on a test circuit board, but Jobs had the ability to find the people he thought were the smartest people to support him. He was charismatic and could convince people to work with him and trust him even before he had a product. The Mac development team was small when I first met him, with an average age of 22. When I saw the Mac team again they had grown to 100 people.

These were people who had obviously never made a commercial product before, but they believed in Jobs and his vision. He can coordinate work on many levels. The first level among these levels is "changing the world"; the other level is actually making exquisite products, designing software, hardware, systems, and peripheral related accessories. For every development, he sourced the best talent he could find in the field and recruited the development team himself, never letting anyone else do the recruiting.

Another thing about Jobs is that he didn’t have a good impression of large organizations. He considered those organizations to be bureaucratic and inefficient. He refers to organizations he dislikes as "bozos." Steve Jobs had a principle that the Mac team would never exceed 100 people. Therefore, if new members are added, someone has to leave. This is typical Jobs: "I can't remember the names of more than 100 employees. I only want to interact with people I know. So if it exceeds 100 people, it becomes a different organizational form, and I I can't work. The way I like to work is that I can take care of all aspects." When I was working at Apple, he also divided departments like this. Steve might say, "The organization can get bigger, but the Mac team can't." The Macintosh team was founded as a product development department. Apple has a centralized sales department, centralized management and legal departments, and a centralized manufacturing department, but there is no actual department dedicated to developing a certain product.

This is true in the field of high-tech products, but it does not mean that many people are required to develop good products. Typically, you only see a handful of engineers working on an operating system. People may think that hundreds of people should work together to develop an operating system, but this is not the case. It was like an artist's studio, and Jobs was the master of the art, looking at and judging other people's work, and most of the time his judgment was veto.

I remember that we worked until 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock in the morning on countless nights, because engineers only showed up after lunch and then worked until late at night. An engineer would show Jobs the software code he had just written, and Jobs would look at it, throw it back to him, and say, "Not yet."

He kept pushing everyone to raise their own expectations, and among developers So he was able to create masterpieces beyond his imagination. The main reason was that on the one hand, Jobs used a high degree of charisma to inspire everyone and make them feel how great they were; on the other hand, he cruelly vetoed everyone's work until he thought the product had reached a sufficient level. The degree of perfection. That's what he asked for the Macintosh.

Steve is very organized. He always has a whiteboard in his office. He has no special talent for painting, but he has extraordinary taste.

This is what differentiates Steve Jobs from others, such as Bill Gates. Bill was also a genius, but he was never interested in good taste. He was always more interested in how to seize the market. Jobs never did that. Jobs pursued perfection and was willing to seize any opportunity to try products in new areas, but always from a designer's perspective.