As part of a series of interviews of Apple notables for the 30th anniversary of Apple, Jack Scully, the CEO who took over from Jobs, made some great comments about Jobs' way of building products.
He mentioned that Jobs had some strong first principles in creating a product:
- Start with the user experience
- Tune the hardware to the software
- Have unparralleled industrial design
- Market a tech product as a fashion statement
- Look at the complete system and building the ecosystems around it (as Apple did with desktop publishing and the iPod)
- Clarify and simplify complex business models
- Attract outstanding people
Scully continues to say that there were of course some personal attributes that allowed Jobs to pull off the things he did. For example, Jobs constantly sees things in a simpler way, he makes no compromises, he is willing to think differently how business can be built.
Another interesting comment by Scully, that I try to distill here is that Jobs is at his best when focused on right brain - creativity, art, music, etc. Jobs once called the Mac 'a bicycle for the mind.'
Interesting perspective here.
