Today on Forum, guest host Rachael Myrow had a provocative exchange with Mitch Altman about Steve Jobs and Apple. Altman co-founded the hacker space Noisebridge in San Francisco -- he's an inventor, author and teacher. A listener named Adam in Berkeley kicked off the back-and-forth when he asked whether Steve Jobs influenced Altman's idea of hacking at all? To which Altman replied:
Mitch Altman: Only in a negative way. Cause, I'm actually not a fan of Mr. Jobs. He was a brilliant marketing person, and I'm not a fan of brilliant marketing. Advertising has its place if you're making something really cool and you want to let people know about it, let people know about it. That's advertising, that's fantastic. But when you manipulate people into buying what they don't want or need, I don't think that serves society well.
Rachael Myrow: Although, I'm going to stand in here and challenge you on this on. I have an iPhone and I love it. And I love the forum it's given. And I know Apple is making a hefty profit. But I love the forum it provides, you consider apps -- anybody with a brilliant idea can toss it up on that app marketplace and suddenly we're all, I don't know, lobbing birds at pigs. Or doing something really helpful like finding a parking space or checking out when the next BART train is coming. I mean, there's so much creativity happening.
Mitch Altman: Sure, sure. I have nothing against all of that or the profit that Apple is making. They're just charging a lot more for their hardware and a lot of their hardware is actually inferior. But they market so well that people get defensive when you say things like that, which is why I like saying it. So anyways, Steve Jobs didn't come up with any of these ideas on his own and he actually killed a lot of innovation. because of his top-down approach of control freakedness.
Rachael Myrow: This is also the nature of companies. You know, they're looking for that ... what will make profit, and the rest gets shoved to the sides. It's kinda the way that form of capitalism works.