I agree with you roadcat.
Steve Jobs had a hand in almost every successful product out the doors (and a rare few that weren’t successful).
Much of the usability ideas came from him, and seamless functionality testing had his hand directly within it as well. Things didn’t ship till Steve said they could, which usually meant it had to meet his demanding specifications.
For someone to demote Steve Jobs to marketer status is to comment from a deep ignorance of Apple’s development model.
One can only hope that Tim Cook & the team Steve developed is as inspired as Steve Jobs was himself. It will definitely be a tough pair of shoes to fill.
There’s something else about Jobs that has to be noted:
Jobs didn’t settle. Time and again in his career, engineers came to him and said “I can deliver X.”
Jobs would say “That’s nice, but that’s not all I wanted. I told you I wanted X+Y, and you’re not delivering Y. Go back and give me Y.”
And Jobs would then set some very aggressive time schedule to focus people’s minds on a product deadline. Time and again, Apple’s engineers would deliver on what Jobs asked.
There’s darn few managers, much less senior managers, in the tech industry who really do that. Most CEO’s don’t like talking to engineers, they don’t give engineers the time of day and increasingly (thanks to the idiot professors at business schools), senior managers just shrug their shoulders, call up some VC and say “I want technology ABC - what do you have that’s like that? And how much will it cost to buy into it?”
And then they go out and acquire some company for absurd valuations to gain a technology that could have been invented in-house.
Jobs wasn’t one much for going the “growth by acquisition” model that is so popular with idiots in senior management today. He told his engineers “I want Y. You *will* give me Y. And you *will* do it PDQ.”
And lo, his engineers would do just that.
That’s a leader.
I’m sorry, but you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
There were teams of people at Apple conducting usability studies and determining how to better the products. This happened whether Jobs was CEO of the company or not.
There were many years and many products put out that established Apple computer as a leader in personal computing and Jobs wasn’t even at the company when that happened.
Like I said, he hung out with smart people, and Apple kept hiring them, even when Jobs was no longer with the company.