No, I'm not talking about economic stimuli, but about Steve. Appleinsider has bits about the origins of iDVD on it's recent post, iDVD hung out to dry as Apple pushes movies online. It's sad to see the home DVD die before I've even seen all that many friends adopt it, but what also struck me was the power of Jobs.

In an interview printed by Pioneer Press, Evangelist and a group of Astarte developers described pitching the simplified app concept to Steve Jobs. 'Jobs never glanced at their presentation,' the article noted. 'Instead, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a square. This is the program, he said. Users will drag their movies here to create DVD menus. Then they'll click 'burn.' That's it. 'I don't want to hear anything about drawers or pop-out' windows, he said.'


That's a great quote, and I wonder how many CEOs could get away with that without burning their employee relations. Jobs is one. Without him, not only is the vision lacking, but the proverbial ethos needed to get the vision done. iDVD is a great app for doing it's job, and is nearly overly intuitive. The only tough bit (no pun intended) is deciding whether you go for top quality or have a movie longer than 90 minutes; that's a well-hidden radio button, iirc.

Anyhow, this sort of vision+motivation is what's missing at Apple now, and will be until Jobs makes it back. Surprisingly, stock's back up around $94.