Steve Jobs: Sale/Marketing People vs. Product People
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it whenever a company stagnates, from Intel to Boeing, to explain what happens when salespeople or finance run the business.
What it is
A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining how sales and marketing people take over mature companies from product people, leading to product decline.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends jonplackett · 2020-11 · on “Go standard library benchmarks – Intel vs. M1”
I think this Steve Jobs clip explains it pretty well. [this video] Basically Intel didn’t need to innovate to make money the last decade. Now it’s come to back bite them on the ass.
Cites deckard1 · 2020-12 · on “Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America”
This is basically what Steve Jobs was talking about, with sales/marketing gaining traction in an established company and driving it into the ground: [this video]
Cites nostrademons · 2025-09 · on “Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement”
It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product
Cites Morizero · 2025-10 · on “I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone”
> without a dictator I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person. [this video]
Cites jmyeet · 2026-03 · on “AI is making junior devs useless”
It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1]. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically. First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing