Antares Nebula
Active Member
I think you're missing a key part of the equation. There is marketing and engineering. And then there is vision. Jobs was not really an engineer (whether software or hardware, though he did help out here and there). But he had the vision. Musk also has the vision (though he is in fact also an engineer, unlike Jobs). Everybody else just copies the vision. It's not about pure engineering or even pure invention. You have to have a creative vision, and of a special kind that is very, very rare. And the will to bend the world to that vision.Jobs was a marketing genius, not an innovation genius. He mainly took things that other people were already doing (for example, Nomad vs. IPod), made versions that may not have always won the stats race but were stylish and user friendly (rather than tools for nerds and businesspeople), and convinced people to not only buy them en masse, but to do so at a premium. And each new product launch was tied into a single ecosystem that just further encouraged people to stay within Apple's sphere.
Personally, I'm not much of a fan of Jobs as a person. But his marketing acumen can't be denied - spotting places where existing niche products can be transformed into mass-market phenomena, and convincing people about how this product is going to change their world and how anyone who doesn't have one is falling behind the times.
IMHO, he was a very different person to Musk. If there's anyone out there in the present who's most like Musk - and I know Musk would hate to admit this, but... it's Bezos. And in the past, I know he'd hate to admit this too (as he's a huge Tesla fan), but... he's most like Edison (the R&D-heavy, works-himself-and-his-workers-hard-but-they-still-line-up-for-the-chance-to-work-with-him-because-he's-doing-all-the-neatest-things CEO simultaneously involved in dozens of revolutionary "sci-fi" fields and bringing them to reality). Tesla, by contrast, had some brilliant insights into some specific fields (to the point of obsession and a bit of madness later in life), but was a terrible CEO and excelled at going broke while other people profited off of his work. Elon probably has a number of "Teslas" working for him right now
For example, Apple right now has both great engineering and marketing, but really no vision. No amount of marketing or engineering would have given Apple the Mac, the iPod, or the iPhone. Same for the Model S, X and 3. Need to have that special creative vision. That's the key. People like Musk and Jobs are once in a lifetime, if even that.
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