Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist fanaticism so as to have power in the world of nerds. This is how it came to be that Jobs is so often remembered as an ‘inventor,’ though he rarely was one. His genius was not technical, but he was a genius at manipulating technical minds. …My impression, based on a number of interactions I witnessed over many years, is that Jobs traded one form of obsessive, principled nerdiness against another. It was useless for a typical designer or marketing person to plead with engineers during the early years of personal computers. Engineers had airtight criteria and data, and that trumped mere opinions and intuitions. But Jobs didn’t plead. He declared even more rigid and exacting criteria.
Jobs won the arms race of control freakery. He remains the only figure in a non-engineering role I have ever seen win this race against engineers outright.