Hey Apple, Who is iMovie's "Brilliant Engineer?"

"One of our most brilliant video engineers went on vacation, a well deserved vacation," said Steve Jobs at Tuesday's Apple press event. "He went to the Cayman Islands [and] shot a bunch of underwater footage with one of the new high-def little camcorders." Jobs went on to explain how the engineer had trouble creating a simple Web video with any existing Apple video-editing application, and invented his own program to solve the problem--""When we saw it, we were blown away." The program was so good that it became iMovie '08.

"I think our brilliant video engineer who invented this is mighty happy," concluded Jobs after demoing the new application. (Here, by the way, is the entire event in QuickTime form.) He had said every nice thing he could about the man and his application. But he left out one thing...

...the brilliant engineer's name.

This wasn't exactly a shock. Once upon a time, Apple was a company famous for glorifying its hardware engineers and software developers. The Woz himself may have been the first famous computer engineer, and members of the original Mac team such as Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were nearly as famous as Jobs himself. (This post at Hertzfeld's wonderful Folklore.org site explains how and why the Mac team got credit for their work; Bill Atkinson's name was even displayed each time you launched MacPaint.) Even Susan Kare, who designed icons and fonts for the original Mac user interface, was a celeb.

Somewhere along the way, though, Apple stopped treating its techies like rock stars. In Steve Jobs' second tour of duty as Apple CEO, Jobs himself has only become more and more famous, but very few other Apple employees are ever singled out for credit. (Two exceptions have been Jonathan Ive, the industrial designer behind the Apple look, and software engineer Avie Tevanian; Tevanian, however, left Apple in 2006.)

These days, the highest-profile Apple employee other than Steve Jobs may be Phil Schiller, the marketing senior vice president best known for playing Jim Fowler to Jobs' Marlin Perkins during product demos. I don't have anything against Schiller, but his prominence is a far cry from the era when the extraordinarily inventive people who designed Apple products got their fair share of glory.

And I also don't mean to bash Jobs alone. It's not as if Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard puts engineers in the spotlight very often. (Web-focused companies are a bit different: Even Google, which remains in some ways a pretty secretive outfit, lets some of its legions of smart geeks talk to the press and get credit for their work.) It's also true that today's tech products are usually the result of collaboration between dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people--you could argue that singling out certain individuals might be unfair or misleading.

But Steve Jobs, more than anyone else in technology, is famous for likening engineers to artists and products to works of art. For the best engineers and products, it's an apt comparison. And by spending so much time on Tuesday lavishing praise on this one engineer who reinvented iMovie, Jobs was acknowledging that one person deserved a huge share of the credit for the new version.

Painters get to sign their work; magazines have mastheads; movie credits now go on for ten minutes, so that even the people who process the payroll get credit. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew the name of iMovie '08's inventor--and of more hardware and software engineers in general?

I'm contacting Apple to see if they'll tell me the name of the iMovie video engineer, and will let you know what I hear...

(BREAKING NEWS: That was quick--I asked one of our Apple contacts via e-mail, then stepped away from my desk for a moment. When I got back, I had a polite response saying that Apple won't disclose the engineer's name.)

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters