steve jobs
Bless the toolmakers
CC-licensed photo from bre pettis.
Bless the toolmakers… but I’m worried that everybody wants to be one.
You look at the celebration of Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc., and you see a celebration of tools. “One of the things that separates us from high primates,” Jobs said long ago, “is that we’re tool builders.” In the next breath he made his great analogy: a computer is “a bicycle for our minds.” Classic, and true.
Today, you look at a sampling of startups and you see two things:
- A whole lot of incredibly smart young men who want to be the next Steve Jobs, and
- a whole lot of tools.
This is the reigning model for startups: make a tool and scale it up. The tool’s potential users can be rich (e.g. Salesforce) or they can be numerous (e.g. YouTube) or they can be rich and numerous (e.g. the iPhone) but any way you go, you are always a step removed from the object of attention. You are not the deal, you are not the Lil’ Wayne video, you are not the flirty text message. You are the facilitator, you are the mediator, you are the vessel.
CC-licensed photo from whiteforge.
What’s the relationship between a toolmaker and a tool user? I wonder about this a lot. I mean, when I read about Steve Jobs’ illness, I think of him with care and gratitude, and I echo Dan Sinker:
Steve Jobs had a hand in every tool that made me who I am. Forever indebted and in awe.
But… I don’t think about Steve Jobs when I’m using my MacBook. I don’t think about Thomas Knoll when I’m using Photoshop. I don’t think about the sublime inventor of the kitchen table (her name lost to history) when I sit here at mine. (I don’t think about the Ikea designer who made this particular model, either.)
Now switch from tools to media.
When I read The Anthologist, I am not really thinking about Nicholson Baker, either. Sure, I think about him when I read the book review and when I flip to the title page, but after that, I’m in the story. But!—I’m going to argue that Nicholson Baker is there with me, in my head, in a much fuller and more direct way than Thomas Knoll is with me when I’m using Photoshop.
Certainly with music, the case is even clearer: the artist’s presence (often literally her voice) is fully and directly felt. Music, especially pop music, imposes itself. It says: I am here with you now!
Now, personally, that relationship is what I’m after. I imagine two scenarios—one where I write a story that 10,000 people read and another where I build a tool that 100,000 people use—and the first is infinitely more appealing.
I want, frankly, to impose myself.
So when it comes to toolmaking… I just don’t understand it. Of course, I understand that these markets exist—markets for sales CRM, markets for video-viewing, markets for personal communication and status-signaling gadgetry. I just can’t understand wanting to be the person who serves them.
“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use,” Freeman Dyson said. I’m supremely glad he feels that satisfaction, and I’m glad so many other toolmakers do, too.
But, is there a chance… just a small one… that today, in the world of startups and internet technology, too many people are making too many tools?
Even as I type it, my fingers recoil, because it sounds like such heresy. The internet is nothing but tools, built and shared. Glory to Github! We need more of this stuff, not less! … Right?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by… toolmaking?
CC-licensed photo from Meanest Indian.
It actually makes me think of the way that consulting used to be such a scourge on the undergraduate landscape, sucking up all of the ambitious, flexible minds because it was prestigious and remunerative and in a way easy. Maybe it’s absurd to think we lost novelists and musicians to McKinsey… but I think we did.
Today, if you’re a person with the toolmaking talent, you actually have a lot of options, of which making a web platform or a framework are just a couple. If you possess the skills to make powerful tools, you’ve got one up on Archimedes. “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth,” he said. You, the toolmaker, can make your own place.
What do I mean?
Think of the electronic musician BT, who for years has enjoyed the advantage of a signature stuttering sound effect that he coded himself. This year, he finally decided to share his software, to put it up for sale—but you can bet he’s already working on the next great effect for his own music. It’s a competitive artistic advantage. (I mean, the dude knows Csound. Nobody knows Csound!)
Or think of Pixar, the Great Toolmaker’s side project. They sell movies, not tools, but the movies wouldn’t be possible without the tools that Pixar and Pixar alone possesses. Pixar is a place where brilliant toolmakers work for a tiny user-base: the artists across the hall. That partnership, and the feedback loop between tool and user that it permits, produces jaw-dropping results.
I mean, here’s what I think: the true intersection of technology and the liberal arts…
…isn’t actually Apple. It’s Pixar.
So I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.
I guess I want fewer aspirational Apples and more Pixar wannabes.
Bless the toolmakers. I’m definitely not complaining here, just thinking out loud, and wondering about this kind of person, the way you might wonder about a world-class tennis player or a wandering ascetic: How can you do that? What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? It is honestly inscrutable to me.
But I also wonder if there are some toolmakers out there right now who feel some of the same doubt. Carried along by the current of conventional (startup) wisdom and, of course, the promise of a great scalable payout, they are busy making a web-based tool for collaborative something-or-other. But in the back of their brains, something feels wrong. Some ambition is left unfulfilled.
Here’s what I say: Come on over. Come join the side that makes books and music and movies. There are great rewards here, too, but not enough toolmakers. We need you.
What (Some) People Like On Twitter
The other day on Twitter, I had a particularly silly/dorky Steve Jobs tweet become crazy popular, like a thousand retweets popular. So — being again, particularly silly and dorky myself — decided to pull some of my most popular tweets into a Storify to try to discern a pattern (if any).
BIG PATTERN: People love pop culture references. But my Twitter feed (and probably yours) regularly ABOUNDS in pop culture references. So that actually turns out not to have a ton of explanatory value on its own.
SMART PATTERN: What people really seem to love are oblique, unexpected pop culture references that hit a particular niche. They’re tweets that say: “this message was only for you; now share it with everyone you know.”
BIG PATTERN #2: People definitely respond in a big way to big news events. If something is going on that’s happening in real-time, the retweet button gets a workout.
SMART PATTERN #2: The problem with big events is that everybody’s tweeting and retweeting everything. Which is fine! It’s good! But at the same time, some sort of conceptual scoop that shines a light on something different about what’s happening adds more value.
BIG PATTERN #3: People love anything that reminds them of their childhood.
SMART PATTERN #3: I love anything that reminds me of my childhood. And that Proustian love is a propulsive force that drives me to write better sentences.
What’s next for TV?
In a post yesterday, I offhandedly referred to “giving up TV.” But like giving up Facebook, very few of us have actually given up TV. What’s happened instead is that (like with Facebook), TV has become a problem.
Sure — historically, TV has probably lost whatever monopoly it had on our total cognitive-surplus, staring-at-screen time. It also may have lost a fair degree of its cognitive priority. For instance, when I recently needed to cut some money from my monthly household budget, I dropped my cable TV, switched the internet to DSL, and kept my phone’s data plan — not the decision I would have made three years ago.
But I probably watch more TV than ever now. It’s just coming in the form of DVDs, video games and Netflix streaming on my Wii, and catching up via Hulu, The Daily Show, etc. on my computer. But — wait. See what I just did there? I just ran together everything I do on the big, stationary screen that sits in my living room (called a television) and the short-to-medium form video originally broadcast for that screen, but which I can’t watch there (called television). And both big, stationary screens that we watch from 6–10 feet away and short-to-medium form broadcast video seem to have a pretty firm lock on our psyches and social practice. They’re powerful, versatile, and fun.
One of the things I loved from the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates joint appearance at D5 a few years ago — a really illuminating talk that I periodically return to, that holds up well and has new resonances now — is how they analyze the natural form factors for digital media. And it sort of divides pretty cleanly, with Jobs (big hit then: iPhone) focusing more on smaller forms and Gates (big hit then: XBox) on bigger ones. Gates, I think, doesn’t get enough credit for his vision here:
Walt: What’s your device in five years that you rely on the most?
Bill: I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.
Kara: Light.
Bill: Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you’ll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there’s navigation computers, there’s media, there’s phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there, but then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there’s quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-size device. But I think those are natural form factors and that we’ll have the evolution of the portable machine. And the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary–that is, if you own one, you’re more likely to own the other.
Kara: And then at home, you’d have a setup that they all plug into?
Bill: Well, home, you’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things.
That idea of “the 10-foot experience” is really powerful to me — even though my living room and TV set are clearly a lot smaller than Bill Gates’s. And the whole point of it is that it’s heterogeneous and versatile — not just in terms of the kinds of machines and platforms that run on them, but in terms of the use of the space itself.
And here’s Jobs, equally visionary, if not more so. (Apologies again for the long blockquote, I like the banter.)
Walt: So what’s your five-year outlook at the devices you’ll carry?
Steve: You know, it’s interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient because, as Bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years.
Walt: And here when you’re saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows PCs?
Steve: I mean, personal computer in general.
Walt: Yeah, OK.
Steve: And, you know, there was the age of productivity, if you will, you know, the spreadsheets and word processors and that kind of got the whole industry moving. And it kind of plateaued for a while and was getting a little stale and then the Internet came along and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet, browsers came along, and it was this whole Internet age that came along, access to the Internet. And then some number of years ago, you could start to see that the PC that was taken for granted, things had kind of plateaued a little bit, innovation-wise, at least. And then I think this whole notion of the PC–we called it the digital hub, but you can call it anything you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house, started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff and it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life.
And you can sort of see that there’s something starting again. It’s not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree.
So I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that’ll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one.
But then there’s an explosion that’s starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them. There’s a lot of things that are not…
Walt: You can get into trouble for using that term. I want you to know that.
Steve: What?
Walt: I’m kidding. Post-PC devices.
Steve: Why?
Walt: People write letters to the editor, they complain about it. Anyway, go ahead.
Steve: Okay. Well, anyway, I think there’s just a category of devices that aren’t as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they’re phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we’re going to see lots of them.
Kara: Give me an example of what that would be.
Steve: Well, an iPod as a post-PC…
Kara: Well, yeah.
Steve: A phone as a post-PC device.
Walt: Is the iPhone and some of these other smart phones–and I know you believe that the iPhone is much better than these other smart phones at the moment, but are these things–aren’t they really just computers in a different form factor? I mean, when we use the word phone, it sounds like…
Steve: We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter. It’s, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what’s inside it anymore?
And that sort of seems to be where we stand right now when it comes to TV: caught between all of the different services and hardware devices competing for that 10-foot experience and the emergent category of these post-PC, video-capable handheld devices — tablets, phones, game consoles, plus the screen of your laptop/desktop PC in the middle.
There are a couple of things from Jobs’s appearance at this year’s conference, D8, that follow up on this exchange. The first, which was better publicized, was Jobs’s comparison of post-PCs like the iPhone and iPad and traditional laptop and desktop PCs to cars and trucks, respectively. The analogy being — just as in the early 1900s, most cars were initially trucks, then smaller cars emerged that were better tailored for urban and suburban living, smaller, post-PC devices like the iPad weren’t going to eliminate traditional PCs, but would gradually replace them as the dominant form of consumer computing. It’s a powerful, provocative idea; 2007 Jobs was clearly more skeptical towards it, more inclined to think that the PC was going to morph into something else.
The other is Jobs’s discussion of the balkanization of the television business — that is, the business of getting content to those screens, not the content providers as such: the multiplicity of settop boxes and lack of genuinely national providers or international standards that prevented any company, from Apple to Google to TiVo, however technologically sophisticated, from rolling out a clear go-to-market strategy. This, I think, does seem to explain why, despite all of the local innovations in DVRs, net-connected game consoles, streaming content, and so forth, TV still seems to be forever putting the pieces together.
Last, finally, is the whole consumption/production imbroglio that similarly washed over the iPad. Is the TV space “merely” a space for consumption? Is that a bad thing? Or could there be new/emergent ways to create/contribute/share/connect there, too?
What do you think? What’s next for TV?
