“Those people deserve respect and recognition too.”

ORLY? Name them.

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Not “great man”. Great vision.

Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not.

Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround himself with high-quality technical people and communicate effectively with them, but make no mistake: they were there to deliver his vision, not their own.

Tech-exclusive geeks a useful resource, but they have to be kept on a zero-length leash lest they start thinking that they should be the ones in charge since they know more about tech than anyone else. And the moment they’re allowed to get away with it, and you end up with the tails-wagging-the-dog internecine malfunction that plagued Sculley’s Apple in the 90s and has to some extent resurfaced under Cook.

Lots of things happened under Jobs 2.0. That was NEVER one of them.

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Case in point: Just take the endless gushing geek love for Cook-Apple’s Swift language. And then look at how little the iOS platform itself has moved forward over the 10 years, it’s taken to [partly] replace ObjC with the only incrementally improved Swift. When NeXT created what is now AppKit, it was 20 years ahead of its time. Now it’s a good ten behind, and massively devalued to boot by the rotten impedance-mismatch between ObjC/Cococa’s Smalltalk-inspired model and Swift’s C++-like semantics.

Had Jobs not passed, I seriously doubt Lattner’s pet project would ever have advanced to the point of daylight. Steve would’ve looked at it and asked: How can it add to Apple’s existing investments? And then told Lattner to chuck it, and create an “Objective-C 3.0”; that is, the smallest delta between what they already had (ObjC 2.0) and the modern, safe, easy-to-use (type-inferred, no-nonsense) language they so pressingly needed.

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Look, I don’t doubt eventually Apple will migrate all but the large legacy productivity apps like Office and CC away from AppKit and ObjC and onto Swift and SwiftUI. But whose interest does that really serve? The ten million geeks who get paid for writing and rewriting all that code, and have huge fun squandering millions of development-hours doing so? Or the billion users, who for years see minimal progress or improvement in their iOS app experience?

Not to put too a fine a point on it: if Google Android is failing to capitalize on iPhone’s Swift-induced stall-out by charging ahead in that time, it’s only because it has the same geek-serving internal dysfunction undermining its own ability to innovate and advance the USER product experience.

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TL;DR: I’ve launched a tech startup, [mis]run it, and cratered it. And that was with with a genuinely unique, groundbreaking, and already working tech with the product potential to revolutionize a major chunk of trillion-dollar global industry, saving and generating customers billions of dollars a year.

It’s an experience that has given me a whole new appreciation for what another nobody person starting out of his garage, and with his own false starts and failures, was ultimately able to build.

And I would trade 20 years of programming process for just one day of salesmanship from Steve Jobs’ left toe, and know I’d got the best deal by far. Like I say, this is not about a person. It is about having the larger vision and having the skills to deliver it.