> If you think Steve Jobs was just some lucky huckster you will never ship a great product

Help build, perhaps. But never command, ship or sell. It's one thing to recognize a skill in someone you do not have. It's another to fail to ever see it.

Exactly. You don't have to like him or like his work. But to fail to see his talent is like thinking that Magnus Carlsen was just in the right place at the right time. Your domain knowledge would have to be so abysmally low that you would have no business even making the claim.

By that definition (for things of a certain scale), does anyone ship a great product?

I think it’s fair to say the iPhone/iPod and by extension iPad never ships without Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were at the right place at the right time with the right resources. Now we have the internet and everyone is connected, it is harder because of the competition.

Bill Gates was an insanely good programmer and Steve Jobs was an insanely good product manager. Yes they also had the right circumstances to succeed, just like J.S. Bach.

You think they did not have competition while IBM was the gorilla in front of them?

You think it's harder fighting one gorilla or a thousand chimpanzees?

IBM were a mainframe company back then. Both Apple and Microsoft were already household names in the personal micro computer world before IBM entered the market.

Source: I lived through that era writing software for micro computers.

IBM was a household name in the 80s. I’m not sure which era you’re talking about, though.

The Apple II came out in 1977. The IBM PC in 1981. Until the PC, IBM might have been known by people but nobody had an IBM at home.

From memory, IBM PCs were not things people had at home until much later. Actually they didn't really show up outside of word processing and spreadsheets in a business setting, in the early days (so for example University CS people were using VAXen and Sun workstations, not PCs).

Household object is not the same as household name. IBM transformed computers between the 1950s and 1980s, and people were aware of that even if they did not own an IBM product. They were a mega corporation with significant advertising and marketing budgets.

They were but that was never in dispute.

The point I made was that IBM were slow to release a home machine. And even when they eventually did release their first PC, it was still viewed more as a business machine. meanwhile Apple and Microsoft (amongst others) were already established in the home computer market.

It took years for the PC to become dominant. Frankly their dominance isn’t even because of IBM but instead because every other manufacturer ripped off IBMs design. Some of us old timers still call those macHines “IBM-compatible” since the term “personal computer” wasn’t always specifically referring to an x86+BIOS, like it later came to be in the 90s.

I do miss the 70s and 80s era of computing. Everything felt new and magical. It was like your imagination was the only limit. A bit like web development in the 90s and AI these days. As nice as it when an industry matures, there is a lot of fun to be had in the early days when everyone is doing silly things because there’s nobody to tell us otherwise.