Hardly. They are both EXTREMELY hard driving, pre-naturally confident, and very difficult to work with. As for Musk's "at heart, an engineer", he's far more the businessman at heart. Just as Jobs was. Jobs of course was far better at "engineering for people", the UX, compared to Musk's more traditional engineering focus. Jobs knew how to communicate with engineers, and how to interface between them and "humans". That's where the core of his technical (rather than managing) skills lay. Musk's strength is more in the numbers....but when asked about his thoughts on Nikola Tesla, Elon commented he sees himself more as Edison. Business man, bringing products to market, first and foremost.
I have a friend who was a programmer at Apple and worked directly with Jobs on at least one project. Jobs was not very good at engineering speak. He had the vision for what the project should look like in the end and regularly blew a fuse when the people charged with implementing it just couldn't follow where he was going. My friend was fired a couple of times by Jobs only to be asked back when Jobs had cooled down. One time Jobs fired him on a Friday and was wondering where he was on Monday because he had forgotten he had fired my friend.
My friend is still insanely loyal to Apple products though.
Jobs did have a talent for what a certain type of consumer wanted and how to present to them in such a way they "got it" immediately.
I do agree Musk is more like Edison than Tesla. Tesla was someone who came up with new technologies. He was an inventor, and a horrible businessman. Edison was driven to take what was already known and produce consumer products with it.
But the comparison ends there. Edison was also more like Jobs. He had a lot of ideas, but he didn't do much to actually implement them. He had a large staff of technicians who did all the work converting the idea into reality.
The point I started out making, but wandered off the point by the end is we like to compare and contrast one thing with another, and it works most of the time, but sometimes a person or a company is unique enough that process breaks down. People of great genius tend to be in a class by themselves. Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Galleo Galilei, Michelangelo, and even Steve Jobs and Elon Musk all stand out in their fields as great geniuses. All of them are/were very eccentric in one way or another and all have done things nobody else in their day did. You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying, but the result is going to be all over the map because these people don't compare well with normal people. They are/were all out at the end of the bell curve.
Companies, especially companies still young enough to be run by the founders (or those who were there very close to the founding) tend to be projections of the CEO's ego. Microsoft during the Bill Gates days was very Gates-like. Apple under Jobs was very Jobs-like and Tesla under Musk is very Musk-like.
Microsoft still makes a healthy profit and they will likely be around for some time, but they haven't been in the headlines as much since Gates retired. They keep chasing the success of Windows 95, but with each new OS version is becomes more and more of a dream. They will likely remain a standard in the business world for the next few decades, but their days of the world looking to them for the next big thing are over.
It's too early to tell, but Apple is headed that way too. They have a staggeringly large pile of cash and a strong rep from the Hobs days to coast on, but while Cook is a competent manager, he doesn't have the vision and drive Jobs had. After Jobs' return to Apple, they released all new devices for new market niches every couple of years and they were constantly refreshing the old products. The only all new product released since Jobs' death was the Apple Watch which was almost ready for market when Jobs died.
Apple has made a couple of attempts to get an Apple car project off the ground, but all efforts have failed. There isn't a maniac at the top whipping the troops to innovate better. Cook is happy to leave the engineers to do their thing, which works with stable products, but not so much when innovating something nobody has successfully done before.
I say successfully done before because anyone who knows the computer business knows much of what Apple did was tried before. The GUI on a computer driven by a mouse was invented by Xerox PARC in the early 70s and there were some workstations that implemented it on the market before Apple tried the Lisa and failed, then finally came out with the Macintosh which was a huge success. Others had tried to make tablet computers work before the iPad, but the iPad was the first one that caught on.
Elon Musk's genius also is in seeing what hasn't been done, but it possible and making it happen. When Tesla was in its infancy there was a lot of people exploring electric cars. An electric conversion industry was springing up in California and the success of the li-ion battery in laptops had a lot of people thinking about adapting the technology for cars. So far Tesla is the only one of the early companies that has grown, all the others are still conversion shops doing a handful of cars a year, or they folded.
By the nature of their businesses, Apple and Tesla are different critters. Cars are vastly more complex machines than computers with many more moving parts. They also are very expensive and resource intensive to make. A car is the second most expensive thing most people will ever own after a house. And in cost per year, it's the most expensive. I'm unusual that I drove the same car for 24 years, most people get another car every few years and most 20 year old cars are completely worn out. A house can last 100 years and still be worth more than when you bought it (mostly driven by land value).
Computers are fungible. A lot of people only keep a computing device for a few years and then they are on to something newer. Computing devices are also a lot cheaper to make and much faster turn with new technology. A factory that covers a few acres can make a million iPhones a year, but a much larger car factory is doing good to produce 100,000 cars a year with a larger workforce.
Tesla has brought in a lot more technology from the computer business than most car companies have. The oversized center screen is still unique to Tesla. I believe some other companies are talking about doing over the air updates, but Tesla has been doing it for 5 years now.
Electric cars are also different tech from traditional cars. They share more tech with the electronics industry than most cars, but ultimately Teslas are still heavy machinery made in an old fashioned car factory (built by GM).
It's possible to compare and contrast Apple and Tesla as well as Jobs and Musk, but in the end it will break down because they are two eccentric geniuses who ultimately are/were in their own class. What their companies do is different enough too that comparing them is difficult.
Funny, I'm the former and not at all the later at all.
The key is to accept it as a tool, stop trying to fight it and let the tool be the tool it is rather than the tool you think it should have been. In short,
be a better engineer.
I approach everything new from basic principles. My first introduction to computing was machine language. I learned fundamentally what a computer could do and approach it from that angle. Every OS except MacOS and some Apple products I've ever used, I can generally figure out how to get from here to there using that approach. With Apple, there is some different way that you have to just have to accept. It doesn't make any sense when approached the way I do.
Maybe. I hope. Clearly dragged kicking and screaming because of the existing expectations of automobiles as a product, particularly out of warranty vehicles. But this isn't natural to them. This isn't a Microsoft thing where they are focus was from so early on was support of 3rd party developers, ahead of the people running the software. "Developers. Developers. Developers." Sure Apple did and has puts huge effort into 3rd party support....and then they'll shank them because it puts their own work towards customers UX ahead of the 3rd party developers. Every time. *shrug*
Expecting something other than this struggle to rage within Tesla? Oh man, you're really hanging yourself out there for a setup to disappointment.
Tesla did announce a few months ago they were going to be rolling out a mechanics training program at some point in the next year.
I do agree Microsoft has been much more open from the start than either Apple or Tesla. Microsoft's documentation on what's under the hood can be cryptic, but it does exist and there is a whole industry of people explaining what Microsoft's documentation is trying to say.
Like iTunes on Windows? Or an adapter cable so I can run a off-the-shelf DVI ported monitor off the Mini DisplayPort on my MBAir?
Yeah, I can use another company's charger on a Tesla.....with some extra hardware adaptor. Tesla went it's own way on charger port standards. For good reason, as believe it or not Apple does, but they still have.
Apple does have a history of creating unique hardware interfaces just to be different. They probably could have done just fine using the same charging/data connector as everyone else, but they had to invent the lightning connector to be different. In many cases they end up adapting to the rest of the industry in the end. They touted Fireware as the alternative to USB for some time, and it still exists on Apple products (it's even used in the Windows world for debugging embedded devices), USB is the standard that even Apple uses for most peripherals.
ITunes is quite possibly the worst piece of software on any desktop OS. Many of my friends are ardent Apple fans and when they are touting the superiority of Apple products over everything else, mentioning iTunes usually shuts them up.
It is another example of what I was talking about above with the "Apple way". When I want to copy something from a cell phone to my desktop, over vice versa, I expect to be able to plug in the device and just move the files I want to move. Instead, iTunes forces you into this weird mirroring scheme and if you have multiple Apple devices you want to plug in, iTunes doesn't care, it will end up mirroring what's on your SO's cell phone to your iPad, even if you didn't want that.
I've made custom ringtones for both Android and iPhone. With Android you plug in the device, it looks like a memory stick so you just move the MP3 with the ringtone to the right directory on the phone and you're done. Once you have the MP3, it takes about 5 minutes. On the iPhone, you need to go through a weird process on iTunes involving several steps I can't remember now to convert the file from MP3 format to some unique format only used for Apple ringtones, then you have to clone your phone to your computer, put the ringtone files in the right place in the image, then mirror the whole thing back.
I did get a third party alternative to iTunes that made it a little easier the last time, but it still took over an hour and a few false starts.
NeXTStep was Berkley Unix on the Mach microkernel. It was only "unique" in the the work that NeXT was doing on top of that was so far out ahead that of course it was different. It's a decades old fork now but it's still VERY MUCH unix, largely open source, and remains nearly fully POSIX compliant. There's adequate toolchain, the vast majority of OSX is open source (iOS somewhat less, but that hardware overall a lot more locked down for security reasons). OSX ports of software are largely grouped as another unix variant.
Windows NT is built on top of a UNIX kernel too. Apple's core OS under there is still more UNIX-like than Windows, but all the major desktop OSs have similar roots.
Towards the end of your post didn't you notice how over and over you were struggling against how things are in attempting to differentiate between Apple and Tesla? Hoping that Tesla will become different than it is, because of the similarities to Apple you don't like?
True. I was trying in vain to get back to my original point: You can compare the two, but at some point all comparisons break down.
Ultimately Apple is in a business where third party vendors making software is usually going to make or break you. For many years MacOS languished vs DOS/Windows because more people were writing programs for Microsoft OSs. Tesla is in a business where proprietary software is the norm. In the car business hardware peripherals and modifications are extremely common, but nobody allows others to modify their software (though there are some aftermarket hacks out there for Tesla as well as other cars).
