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How Apple's Story Is Like Breaking Bad
theodp writes "Over at CNN, Omar L. Gallaga explains how Apple's story is like Breaking Bad, the TV drama whose protagonist — high school chemistry teacher Walter White — decides to use his science skills to cook methamphetamine to provide for his family after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Walter takes shocking, out-of-character risks but reinvents himself as a brilliant, feared meth chemist who grows more ambitious, ruthless and cocky with each victory. 'Like Steve Jobs,' writes Gallaga, 'Walter White's cancer awakens a panic in him to hurry up and leave a legacy through his work.' Gallaga continues: 'Like Walter White, it [Apple] has mixed the proper elements at just the right amounts to create highly pure, addictive products. The products have been made within secretive working conditions. The skill employed to design and manufacture them tends to make what competitors put out seem like cheaper, cloudier, less effective imitations.'"
And Samsung is Pollos Hermanos or just Tuco?
Can't we for a while at least stop ascribing a success, which is due to the hard work of a very large group of people over a long period to one man, and further look for some magical parallels where there are none?
Is that why there have been so many deaths surrounding the manufacture of Apple products?
It is shocking how putting effort into producing a good product actually pays off from time to time.
Nowdays it takes a real outlaw to put significant effort into appealing to customers.
Slow news day?
Walter White didn't invent anything! He just packaged up his meth in blue crystals instead of boring white ones and the spinners were all like, duuude, I'm only going to buy your meth!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Walter was a cunt as well.
Really? This article is just dumb. And ridiculous. And link-bait.
Stop with the BS "like Apple" stories and OMG Apple-is-amazing stories!
People always blah blah about KISS. But when it comes to most products it usually ends up being too many cooks. Years ago I built a website for a telco. They wanted two things. One was online bill viewing and the other was to promote this new thing called DSL. Website was supposed to cost around $50,000. So we cook along and they keep adding more and more to the website with nearly every department in the telco getting their little bit in; one part being a what's happening at the local universities. After the budget blew through $200,000 they started to suggest that we cut the online bill check part along with the rate card. One of our people stood up in the meeting and said, "Those are the only two things on the whole damn site that people will want. Cut those and you have $200,000 worth of dog shit."
But it gets even worse. This new DSL was being introduced at a time before cable modems. The highest speed connection of any geek I knew was a 128k ISDN line and this new DSL was going to give you 1Mbs for $40. Then as I did up the specs for it for the site I realized that the whole business model was a stupid Novell system of renting applications such as Microsoft office. Internet was way down on the list of features. I called up the Product Manager and he said, "Well we might not even offer connectivity to the internet initially." I told him that if they were able to offer 1Mbs for $40 when all the competition was offering 56kbs for $20 they were going to clean up. He told me that there was pressure from their own dial up to not offer internet via the DSL. I think what may have saved it was that I told him he would be out of a job if he didn't offer internet and they would be out of a job while he would ride a wave to the future if he did.
Now think about the above. This is the big telco in my area taking business advice from a tiny web shop. Good advice if I say so myself.
So how many companies don't have a single man who can stand up and say "whoa there cowboy. That might look good on a spread sheet but our customers will want to ram it up your ass.... sideways....covered in the juice from a ghost pepper."
From what I have read about Steve Jobs is that people brought shit to him with a great story and they left his office crying. Then they came back to him with something less shitty and left crying again. This would happen over and over until it just wasn't shitty anymore.
It is hard to tell an employee that what they just spend a lot of time on was crap. It is unpleasant for most normal people. So I suspect that where Steve Jobs' genius lay is in somehow being an ass right up to but not beyond the point where everyone quit. Beyond that he was probably just pretty smart.
It wasn't about underestimating Apple, but rather, needing a visible competitor to not be broken up via an antitrust suit. Also, in what universe does apple have the 'online video' market?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The difference is that breaking bad is fiction- it doesn't actually demonstrate anything. The writers decide the outcome, and the results are imagined, not real.
For the "I hate Apple week", has it already started?
Steve Jobs (Wikipedia): According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.
Breaking Bad ("Say My Name" Recap): When Walter tries to browbeat Jesse into staying, the young man will have none of it. He even walks away when Walter tells him he won't get a nickel.
Walter takes shocking, out-of-character risks
Out of character? You haven't been paying attention, especially in the current season. They made it clear from the very first episode that Walt is not a nice guy. His anger issues cost him his share of the startup that would have made him rich, and sent him off to a teaching job he despises and that doesn't pay the bills. Later, he refuses to accept help with his medical expenses from his former partners, obviously still pissed at whatever issue forced him to break with them.
He wears a mask of a mild-mannered suburban nebbish, but his sociopath side becomes evident early on and gradually becomes the only face he shows to his colleagues in the drug business. More and more, people suffer because of Walt's lack of moral center, sometimes just because he's mad at them. (So long Mike!)
Mr. Wizard was always a front. Now he's Nero.
Jeez, what a great show. I look forward to the final 9 eps with anticipation and dread.
"Apple's story is like 'Breaking Bad' in that I really don't care about either of them, and am tired of people always bringing them up and telling me I need to be watching it"
"If you want to know how Apple's epic run turns out or how its ongoing battle with longtime rival Microsoft is resolved, you can watch the series, which ends its current half-season of eight episodes with a finale Sunday night."
It sure sounds like an advertisement to me... either that or CNN really has completely run out of news to create. My expectations from CNN are very low, so this doesn't surprise me much. What surprises me is that this is on Slashdot. Perhaps the story title should be "CNN ran out of news" instead.
My favorite part on the CNN page, on top it reads: Filed under: Innovations ... How this is innovation?
ummm... betamax was negligibly better initially, and inferior toward the end of the 80s.
the battle was won ENTIRELY on record time. when beta came out with long-play modes, they were suddenly at less quality than VHS for the same record time.
who would want a format with max length of 60 mins when the average movie is about 90 mins?
now... 60 mins is an eternity for a camera operator, as the only portable format at the time was 16mm film which gave just a little over 10 mins record time. so guess what happened to beta?
it's funny - lack of reading the market that led to the failure of both formats. beta missed the consumer market, and when DVDs came along, VHS missed the opportunity with the pro market (D-VHS launched too late and was only really competitive with HDV which was a much more convenient form-factor). beta is still alive because though it failed to disrupt the consumer market, it completely disrupted the news gathering and television markets and became a main-stay until just a couple of years ago (XDCAM is the news-gathering darling now, either on cards or caddied-blu-ray discs).
From TFA:
'Like Walter White, it [Apple] has mixed the proper elements at just the right amounts to create highly pure, addictive products. The products have been made within secretive working conditions. The skill employed to design and manufacture them tends to make what competitors put out seem like cheaper, cloudier, less effective imitations.'
I am no Apple fanbois, but I had spent past few decades in the tech field
What TFA has forgotten to list are the following:
I. Vision
Almost everyone in the Silicon Valley, since the 1980's, have gone through similar experiences, and have used similar gadgets.
What Steve Jobs got, which others unfortunately didn't have, is a vision.
From hardware (Mac to NeXT to iBook to iPhone / iPad), to software (MacOS to OS X to iOS), Mr. Jobs opted for his own path
That takes vision.
II. Attention to detail
We can't deny that the one thing that makes Apple different from the rest of the crowd is their attention to detail.
From the way MacIntosh can create smooth curvy fonts to the "feel" of the original iPhone when it first came out (as versus the offering from the rest of the cellphone industry), Mr. Jobs had taken great pain in making sure that the products that have the "Bitten Apple" mark on it come with as few bugs as possible
As I said, I am no Apple fanbois, and I do not own any Apple product
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A better analogy would be that Apple is like the Little Red Hen.
"Who will dare to make a computer that gets rid clunky serial ports and is USB-only to drive development of USB as a platform?" asked Apple.
"Not I" said Dell.
"Not I" said Gateway
"Not I" said Compaq.
"Not I" said Acer.
"Then I'll do it myself" said Apple. And she completely broke backwards compatibility to make the iMac.
"Who will make a minimalist music player without a billion clunky extras that product managers want to add and that has a really neat jog-wheel that give people a great user experience?"
"Not I" said Phillips.
"Not I" said Diamond.
"Not I" said Mitsubishi.
"Not I" said Sony.
"Then I will" said Apple. And they made the iPod.
"Who will spend large sums of money to have design engineers experiment for months molding a block of clay into a non-clunky shape that works great for cell phones?" asked Apple.
"Not I", said Samsung.
"Not I", said Nokia.
"Not I", said LG.
"Not I", said HTC.
"Then I will" said Apple. And she designed a phone with rounded corners.
"Who will spend lots of money and take some risk designing cell phones with a revolutionary slide-to-unlock feature and the first really non-clunky mobile web browsing experience that includes pinching and swiping gestures?" asked Apple.
"Not I", said Samsung.
"Not I", said Nokia.
"Not I", said LG.
"Not I", said HTC.
"Then I'll do it myself" said Apple. And she designed the iOS UI.
And when the iPhone was released, the tired little company in Cupertino asked her competitors "who will help me use my designs to make billions in revenue I've earned by taking all sorts of marketing and design risks and putting in so much efforts to do what competitors didn't to move a stagnant and complacent industry forward like I've always have had to do?" asked Apple
"I do" said Samsung.
"I do" said Motorola.
"I do", said LG.
"I do" said HTC.
"No, I'm going to keep all of those designs to myself" Apple said, and she happily sued them into oblivion. The end.
Jobs' sense of his specialness and his rush to get things done before he died was there way before the cancer was found.
This.
On his return to the company, he revamped apple -- very solidly and successfully -- before he was diagnosed with cancer. That he continued to do so ANYWAY is a tribute to his already held belief in himself and what he was doing... not a result of some kind of psychological compensation because he had a terminal disease. Sorry, but but in our macroscopic world -- at least at our current level of technology -- you cant take something that happened after time t and say it caused something before time t.
Because the signal is always breaking and the voice quality is bad :(
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Maybe it's just because I've seen every episode of BB.
Who is so desperate to keep Jobs' name in the press that they'd stretch things this far?
I've never seen "Breaking Bad", but if it is about a genius nerd (Woz) being exploited by an arrogant businessman, then I think the comparison is spot on.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
...so Tim Cook (get it.. cook?) is going to arrange to whack google, htc, motorola, samsung and LG in the same 2 minutes. /I really liked Mike.