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Steve Jobs Insult Response

Mike Cane · 10.9M views · 2011-06-09 · 5:18

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Overview

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

On Hacker News

Commenters link it as a canonical statement of Jobs's product philosophy and as an example of handling an insult calmly and articulately.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2011–2022

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What people said

chx · 2017-12 · Strong recommendation

Watch Jobs in his prime a year later describing his philosophy: [VIDEO] I am very far from an Apple fanboy but gosh, this guy totally gets it.

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SenHeng · 2022-06 · Recommendation

Some good examples by Elon Musk and Steve Jobs described in this article. [LINK] This was probably one of Steve Job's most impressive example. [VIDEO]

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EricE · 2020-08 · Recommendation

Jobs was all of that and more. Modern personal computing wouldn't exist without his insistence at making "Computers for the rest of us". There were many quite pissed at Apple for selling pre-assembled, ready to use computers. It was thought that unless you could assemble your machine you didn't deserve it. Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects. And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either. I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll: [VIDEO] How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many. So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.

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Sources

Video by Mike Cane, played through YouTube.

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