"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Sales and marketing - and financialization and capital efficiency. I got no beef with accountants, but I think companies need just enough focus on financialization and low to medium priority on capital efficiency (ie, look out for stupid wastes of capital).
Perspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc).
Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went to paying customers.
Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI factory floor to deal with "production hell."
Bill Gates personally debugged MS-DOS.
The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not doing this stuff lulls people into a distaste/disdain/disrespect for it.
Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting inventory or money or whatever.
bill gates was a very subpar developer. that's not help, that's narcissistic meddling and micromanaging. if he was good at anything technical, or arguably business strategy, ms-dos wouldn't have been the utter garbage that it was.
musk sleeping on the floor is a publicity stunt, not totally dishonest, but 98% maybe.
jobs? complete a-hole and basket case. a lazy crappy worker who physically smelled bad. if he ever spent a couple hours doing honest work soldered boards, it was 100% for the ability to claim some kind of heroic epic later, or maybe just a manic fit.
the bean-counter stereotype isn't entirely false. it's a specialization of any number of process-bound, organizationally-loyal, myopic, useless cogs. any rare good talented "bean-counter" clearly knows that they are outnumbered and out-gunned by the other inept assholes and bureaucrats in their dept.
there are a large number, probably a majority of people, that are honest and want to do a hard day's work. they are stabbed in the back, trampled, and betrayed by the aforementioned personalities.
the problem is here is just that we keep rewarding, with attention and money, entirely the wrong folks. these famous and very rich folks are merely a combination of survivorship bias, luck, and the fact that to win big you really do need a narcissist who is not afraid to make irrational enormous bets with other peoples money.
indeed, don't disagree. still toxic and more lucky than good (in the bill/jobs/musk) cases. don't even get me started on the non-technical CEOs. they suck even far worse.
Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but 4 is when iPhone took over the world.
It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it let them fix the issues and never look back.
The product was otherwise good save a frustrating flaw that was easy to fix, but probably wouldn't have ushered in the era of dominance if they had to do a total recall.
Would I have been happy if I was an iPhone user at the time? No, I would've been livid.
Great phone. Never any problems with reception. And no, I didn't keep the first one in a case, ever, thought it was too pretty for that. Hence the second one ;)
Being a hackerish sort, I certainly tried to "hold it wrong", often enough. Couldn't get the damn thing to cut out, though.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Steve Jobs (1995) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview