Why dont people consider Steve Jobs a great engineer?

[gwen]

There has been a lot of debate on steve jobs great contributions. A lot of people claim that his true genius was on the marketing end of things. However, he does have well over 300 patents, so he is considered by some a great inventor as well as a marketing genius. Also, on one end people claim that he contributed in design and not in the specific technical aspects of these inventions. I feel that based on his track record, he is a more prolific and ingenious engineer than wozniak

[gilleabart]

Jobs was more of a marketing and business person, compared to Wozniak who designed the first two Apple computers alone.
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All those patents you mention belong to Apple, not Steve Jobs, which were obtained by the hard work of over a thousand of engineers, and lawyers that work for Apple. Even if you got the best engineer ever, nobody would be able to produce that many patents.

The big thing about Apple products is trend and marketing. For example, think about the first iPods, MP3 players already existed but the huge marketing campaign that Apple made marked the difference and made it a desirable item (like most Apple products now).

Nevertheless, he was a great engineer.

[hob97]

The patients were made by the company (hired engineers) but not him. People seem to think he did EVERYTHING the company did. His greatest accomplishment was marketing. He is a GENIUS in that department. Apple products are more about style than function. PCs/Microsoft products/operating systems no matter who thinks differently, are more powerful/technical than Apples but they have been overtaking in style and ease of operation. Not to mention they changed the world of music with iPods and iTunes which nearly everyone below the age of 30 has in a first world country because they market them so well. Early designs of iPods and my iPod Touch 2nd gen has piss poor performance since it is more focused on design but they've gotten better. He is less of an engineer and is more of a business man.

[slaine]

Because on the engineering side of things, it was countless other people who came up with the ideas.

@Eric T, I'm happy to say I'm one of those in the first world without an iPod! Quite happy with an alternative I've been using for 6+ years.