Thoughts on Jobs

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A few thoughts with Steve Jobs’ passing today at age 56.

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There is something about artists and dying young:

  • Vincent van Gogh, age 37
  • Jim Morrison, age 27
  • Janis Joplin, age 26
  • John Lennon, age 40
  • Jimi Hendrix, age 26

There is no doubt that Jobs was an artist and visionary. A little older than the others listed above, but young for this modern era where he could have led Apple for another 20 years at least.

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I bought my first computer, an Apple IIc, in 1986. I was 13 years old and had been making card-based and dice-based baseball and football games for a few years already by then, starting at age 9. I loved that computer. I learned to program in BASIC on it, learned to write code, learned what it meant to invent.

In college I went crazy and abandoned my calling for a few years, along with a number of other discrepancies. But I rediscovered my love of code in 1994. It isn’t really the love of code, though, I learned much later. It is really a love of invention.

I can thank Steve Jobs for all of this.

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What is well-known is that The Beatles were Steve Jobs’ favorite band. What I never realized before, though, is how similar the personal histories of Steve Jobs and John Lennon are. Adopted as children, college drop outs, inventors in their own rights, ability to morph and evolve their product in time, interests in Buddhism, dead way before their contributions to society were exhausted. It is stunning how much the two are alike.

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He survived a long time for a person with pancreatic cancer. Only 4% of pancreatic cancer patients survive five years, the worst survival rate of all cancers. Thank goodness, too. If he had died in 2004 when he first took a leave of absence, we might not have had the iPhone or the iPad.

Jobs’ passing has brought some powerful emotions for me. My aunt died from pancreatic cancer three years ago.

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Steve, wherever you are, I want to make you a promise: I will do my best to always tackle the important problems. Every day, I will bring passion to my job and bring magic to my software. It’s the least I can do given the passion and magic you have brought to my life.

Building Loyalty

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Support makes a huge difference in whom I choose to buy products from. A few examples:

  • From the time I bought my first Macbook in 2008, the first unibody version, I was having troubles. It didn’t seem to sit flat on the desk and the CD had a hard time going in. It was just enough to be annoying but not enough to make me want to give up my primary computer for a week or two. About a year later, as I was finally preparing to take the thing into Apple, I dropped it and dented the corner. When I took the computer in, I explained what the problem was originally, that I had dropped the computer, and was willing to pay for it because of my own stupidity. The Apple rep went through all the paperwork and then changed his mind at the very end, comping me the fixes. This happened again last week for a friend who dropped his iPad. I’m partially willing to buy Apple products because they treat me right.
  • In the mid-2000s I bought a bunch of Dell computers.  Even though we bought and paid for Windows XP Pro and even though the disk said Windows XP Pro, when we went to reinstall, the version of the OS was Windows XP Home. I called Dell to get a replacement disk and the guy refused to send me one, eventually sending me to a manager who begrudgingly sent one out. It took me 45 minutes to get what they owed me. I wasn’t asking for a new registration key — just the disk.
  • I know Netflix is taking a pounding right now but every time they have a network problem, I get an email offering me a pro-rated portion of my monthly bill back, if I want it.
  • Last year I got involved in a Kickstarter project for a book. I didn’t hear anything for a long time and then received an early release version of the book some time this summer. That was a nice touch. I even sent back some feedback but never heard anything. When the book was actually released — for twice what I put in on the project — I heard nothing. I reached out to the person who wrote the book and he kicked it over to an assistant who ordered one for me on Amazon.com. What a missed opportunity. A little note from the author thanking me for having faith in him, a signed edition, something special that would make me want to brag about this book to everyone I know and make me feel better about the fact I could have bought it for half as much if I wouldn’t have helped out. Instead… I’m telling you this story.
  • I ordered a couple of books from Amazon recently and after it shipped but before I received them, the price dropped. I emailed Amazon to tell them this and they issued me a $12 refund without any fuss. For the record, Amazon will automatically charge you less if the price drops before it ships but they generally don’t once it ships.

Each company has two choices: we can either treat our customers as enemies or we can treat them as friends. Go the extra mile for them and I believe it will come back ten fold.

My Ears Are On Fire

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So… if you haven’t heard, Amazon announced a bunch of new Kindles yesterday. For the most part, I think the pundits have nailed it so a few quick bullet points before I dive into the meat of my post:

  • Awesome prices! $80 for a Kindle, $100 for a Touch version and $200 for the tablet are amazingly low. (Marco Arment points out that the new Kindles (except Fire) are all with Amazon’s ad service in place, though, so if you can’t stand the ads it will really cost $40 more.) I’ve considered a dedicated e-reader for years but may pull the trigger now that all the buttons are gone, the devices look great, and the prices are awesome.
  • RIM is in trouble. The device looks almost identical and supposedly has similar specs. Oh, but the price of the Fire is $300 less. (If Apple is suing Samsung for copying iPads and iPhones, will RIM sue Amazon for mimicking the Playbook?)
  • Chris Espinosa wrote some interesting tidbits on the new Fire browser and how it could be used to gather even more info about you. (We could move middle class salaries forward in this country if we could figure out how to make Google, Amazon, etc., pay for all the data they find valuable and have collected on us for free.)
  • I don’t think this is an “iPad killer.” The media is overwrought with hyperbole and link bait and no headline is link bait like “iPad killer.” Given that, John Gruber and Michael Mace have well-thought-out articles on this topic. Michael’s headline pretty much says it all: iPad and Kindle Fire together could be a buzz-saw in the tablet market, cutting down all competitors in their path.
  • One other thing I want to point out that is particularly appropriate is FAKEGRIMLOCK’s guest post over at Fred Wilson’s blog today. FAKEGRIMLOCK talks about how products/companies with personality win. Seems to be that Amazon, Apple and Google are all kings of personality in the tech world right now. Companies like RIM, Nokia and Microsoft have lost some of theirs.

So… on to my thoughts and these I will focus on developers. I think our world is fracturing into tiny fiefdoms. Sure, today Amazon’s tablet uses either Android 2.2 or 2.3 but in the future what are the odds that it stays perfectly compatible? It will always be something: a unique screen dimension, a feature Amazon needs ahead of Google or one Google doesn’t want at all, a tweak to a “bug” that developers have come to rely on. Something.

And when that happens, it is not write once, run everywhere. It is write once for one platform and then hack in fixes for the others. This is the bane of development.

Is this a problem already on Android? Of course. But I would argue that products like the Kindle Fire (and Barnes and Noble Nook) exacerbate this issue. Look at all the advertising for Kindle Fire. Go ahead, look. There is only one place I have seen that actually mentions Android, and that is the Amazon App Store.

Because of the minimal marketing of the Android brand, Amazon has minimal need to remain completely compatible with the Android core.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means when it comes to Android development, we as developers must focus on one platform at a time instead of writing for an OS. We won’t say we write for Android. We’ll say we write for the Amazon Fire.

No Time Like the Present To Make Your Future

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While there are lots of new and interesting things going on in mobile, an article from a college student this morning bemoaning what Congress and the President are doing to help their job prospects caught my eye.

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana apparently spoke at Georgetown University, saying that 14 million unemployed is the “red menace” but there are limits to what government can do to resolve the issue.

Fred Messner, writing at FrumForum, responded:

While Daniels’ lived up to his reputation, speaking about concrete policy proposals, as a college student I worry about a job in 2014, not a government check in 2054, especially since I’m not planning on getting any government checks at all anyway. Regulatory, entitlement, and tax reform have little to offer us in the short term.

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I admire his honesty, but is this really the Republican Party’s attitude toward massive, crushing unemployment? Can nothing be done for laid-off workers and future workers (like myself) whose only crime will be timing their graduations badly?

Well, Fred, welcome to the real world. While we would all like to bury our heads in the sand and let someone else take care of our problems, that’s not always possible. Sometimes we have to make our own destinies.

When I went to college, 1991, we were in the worst recession we had had in a while. Everyone at school was bemoaning the fact that jobs were scarce for college students entering the work force. By the time I graduated I decided I would take the bull by the horns and make my own future — I started a company and am still running it, to this day, 14 years later.

Fred, you are in an enviable position. You are likely young and without family obligations. Your expenses are probably pretty low. And because of this you have a distinct advantage: you have a huge run-way to make your own way. Sure, you probably have debts but so did I (~$60,000 in 1997 prices) and so did my cousin (+$100,000 in 2003 prices) and both of us managed to pay them off while starting businesses.

My advice to you: if you are waiting for the government to come through for you, you will have a very long wait. Grab the bull by the horns. Make your own future.