Steve Jobs: An Unexpected Appreciation
And at the center of it all was Steve Jobs. Contrary to myth, he was never an engineering genius like, say, Steve Wozniak. But where his real talent lay — as a technology impresario — was of far greater importance, and infinitely rarer. As in the early days of Apple, Jobs by the turn of the new century was exhibiting almost perfect vision not just for what the marketplace wanted in new consumer products, but what it would want once it saw them.
Here in Silicon Valley, we tend to throw around terms like “visionary” with abandon. But more than anyone in the Valley’s history, Steve Jobs deserved the title. And while others have exhibited this trait briefly — and are celebrated for it — Jobs not only displayed this talent for generations of new technologies, but managed to imbue his entire company with it. In many respects, today’s Apple Computer is Steve Jobs’ greatest invention — a giant company that still manages to reward risk-taking and radical innovation. There has never been another company quite like it — and it all rested on Jobs’ extraordinary willingness, almost unique among Fortune 500 CEOs, to always reward risk-taking even when it failed, and punish “safe” thinking.
This kind of corporate culture would be admirable at any time, but in the first decade of the 21st century, when the battered tech industry and crippled venture capital profession almost always took the safest and most conforming path, Steve Jobs’ Apple often seemed like the only interesting company in consumer electronics; the one ray of light in a dreary economy. Everybody else just seemed to be following in Apple’s wake, waiting for Jobs & Co. to introduce the latest wonder product … and then race to create second-rate imitations. It was during this period, like many others in the Valley, I found myself rooting for Jobs and Apple as the last best hope of electronics.
Something else happened as well: Steve got sick. Steve Jobs, pancreatic cancer survivor, made his first public appearance with his celebrated Stanford graduation speech. This was a new Steve. If some of his bad habits remained, they were also tempered by the new-found wisdom of someone who has just faced his own mortality. In an odd way, the cancer seemed to purify Jobs, removing the small things in life at which he often showed his worst, and focusing him on the big things, where he was always in his glory.
Though he was idolized long before that, it was only in the last few years that Steve Jobs reached his full potential and became the great figure he was always destined to be. Seemingly knowing that his time was short, and stripped of the ego that had been his biggest burden, Steve at last became a great CEO, just as he had always been one of the greatest of all entrepreneurs. To that unmatched run of landmark products, he now accomplished one more thing never achieved by his famous Valley predecessors — he took Apple from the garage to become the most valuable company in the world. It was the perfect finish to one of the most amazing lives of his generation — and even those of us who knew-him-when found ourselves cheering.
What will be his legacy? It is far too early to tell. There are the great products, but they will fade, sooner rather than later in the fast-paced world of tech. Apple? It will be a healthy company for a long time, but there is no one who can take Steve’s place and put the stamp of his personality on the firm. If Hewlett and Packard, having created the most celebrated of all corporate cultures, couldn’t keep it going after they left, does anyone think that Apple will remain a risk-taking innovator? No, its likely fate will be a genteel middle age with strong profits and low incentives to take new risks.
As for Jobs himself, there is little that can be learned from his example. He was such a complex bundle of brains and quirks, charisma and cruelty, pettiness and prophecy that he is likely sui generis. You can’t clone him, copy him, or teach him, no matter how valuable an economy full of Steve Jobs might be.
So in the end the only real legacy of Steve Jobs, beyond a few products on display in museums, will probably be the life of the man himself . Generations of budding entrepreneurs will now know that it really is possible to go all of the way: to start from nothing, build the most important enterprise on the planet, change the world … and through it all, as Steve Jobs told the Stanford graduates, love every step of the journey.
Don’t miss video: “Wozniak talks about his friend Steve“
How fortunate we are to live in a time where Jobs and Gates could re-invent the future, reap the rewards and change people’s lives in small but significant ways.
Gates was hardly in Jobs’ class. His work was highly derivative. Microsoft’s success and profits was based on its near monopoly hold on the market, and it continues today out of sheer momentum. There’s a reason Microsoft paid billions over the years to those abused by the company’s market abuses.
Oh yeah, Gates was a scoundrel and a thief. The whole computing revolution was started by Jobs alone. And Wozniak? Wozniak, who?
You are an ass.
This was a wonderful column! Enjoyed it immensely.
Irony of ironies is that Steve Jobs, a committed iberal, embraced the ideals of American exceptionalism, the free market and conservatism. And he took all the risks and did it all on his own.
Elizabeth Warren and the vermin beclowning themselves on Wall Street, do you realize that?
Mike: wonderful column. Captures the “unseemly” stuff of the early years which is an important part of the whole picture.
I don’t know of anyone who took greater advantage of a “second chance” in business than Steve Jobs. His 1997-2011 stint at Apple was superior to his first one which ended in 1985 with his ouster.
Had he not returned, his passing might have been marked with such comments as “mercurial,” “early-promise,” “quick-tempered,” and “reality-distortion field.” Instead, the comments are “our generation’s Disney” and “true visionary.” Jobs learned a lot from his failure and his years in the wilderness.
Lesson: if you get a second chance (at love, business, or some other endeavor), grab it with gusto.
I was a slightly older contemporary working in high tech on the East coast. As a development engineer I didn’t care for Jobs in the early days or his cult like cadre of followers. However I could see the genius in his innovation, even in early misses like Lisa. Listening to advisers in the VC community about “the right way” got him hiring Sculley, a big mistake that got him fired yet taught him valuable self lessons. His record of innovation is sorely missed at a time when this country really needs true job and wealth creators, not politicians claiming to do so while actually wasting our tax dollars on favored crony companies. He was truly unique.
Steve does leave a great team at Apple, and I hope you underrate its ability to continue creating innovative ideas. After all, everyone at Apple is seeped in Steve Jobs’ style and culture. So I am hoping you are too pessimistic in thinking that now that Steve is gone, Apple innovation dies with him.
It’s interesting that you consider the changes wrought by his illness to be what brought him to greatness. And yet I don’t think that is so. After all, iPhone and MacOS X, his two greatest achievements, were built before he got sick.
It does seem like he has mellowed, and was nicer to employees during his final years, but those were undeniably years when his team was performing exceptionally well. Perhaps they didn’t need as much screaming and goading as they did in the past.
I think that Steve’s true legacy is the product categories he has invented. Multitouch smartphones and tablets will be forever associated with his name. The first reasonably affordable GUI computer will be forever associated with his name. I suspect we will always have something like a desktop computer, and a multitouch smartphone, and a multitouch tablet, with us. Individual products live and die like mayflies. Product categories live for decades or more. For as long as those products continue to exist, we will remember Steve.
So farewell, Steve. May Apple continue to live and grow as your true legacy!
(Not to mention Pixar
. I’m surprised how little ink Pixar gets in Steve’s obituaries.)
David
A lovely and accurate elegy for a complex man.
Where will the next one come from? Who knows, but I know such types are still out there. Part of the adventure for the rest of will be finding him through his products, and we will through our own choices.
…Superb column, and an excellent contrast to the syrupy accolades being broadcast right now, straight from a decades long observer of the subject. Journalists have an obligation to the truth; this is especially true when they are writing in the first person…kudos, sir.
My favorite “Jobs appreciation” piece so far. I was shocked too by how moved I was by his death, even though, as Michael indicates, it was far from unexpected.
Apple will continue to innovate off its current selection of products, but what will happen next will depend on future job hires. Jobs’ genius was in finding creative people and giving them free rein. As that generation moves from Apple and fades from the scene, the quality of those who follow will determine the company’s future.
It’s an interesting coincidence that, the same day Jobs passes, another story broke: Kodak, the company that invented the digital camera in 1975, has hired an adviser in bankruptcy and restructuring because they waited too long and the new technology left them behind. If Apple cannot preserve its culture of innovation; if it cannot find creative geniuses willing to work for it, the Jobs era will be its high point.
Kodak didn’t wait too long. They knew technology was sweeping away their old markets, and they tried – very hard – to retool. They just couldn’t. It’s not easy.
That’s similar to what happened to the New England computer industry.
While the personal computer revolution was gathering steam on the West Coast, the New England computer companies were continuing to produce their bread-and-butter minicomputers–downsized mainframe computers for industrial applications. They also produced compatible clones of IBM mainframes. When the Apple II came out, the New England computer companies largely ignored it. They couldn’t see what was coming.
And as a result, many are gone now: Digital Equipment Corporation (once the second largest employer in Massachusetts after Raytheon); Wang Laboratories (the largest employer in Lowell Massachusetts); Data General. After all the IBM PC clones started selling like hotcakes, there was a frantic scramble to catch up to the new personal computer marketplace; but it was too late. All these companies went bankrupt and disappeared.
And that’s as it should be. Rather than running to the Government claiming that Digital Equipment Corporation is “too big to fail” because of all the workers it employs and pleading for a Federal bailout.
In 1984, we bought 6 VAX 11/780s plus peripherals for a drone control system for about $6M. Today, that whole system could be replaced by this $1100 MacBook.
What is surprising is that Kodak managed to survive for so long. If you were looking for a company that was was 180 degrees from Job’s. Kodak would be it. Kodak was not really a camera company: it was essentially a paper and chemical company. Its focus was on the chemicals of photo development and the negatives and coated papers that “snapshots” were printed on. It is almost totally forgotten that it created the first big multi-copy office copier system, “Verifax”, a big user of chemicals and paper. It turned down XEROX, invented in Rochester, its HQ city, because it used ordinary non-proprietary paper. Kodak cherished monopoly. It monopolized color printing until it realized it was killing its photo-developer sales base and would lose it to competitors. From being an early innovator it lost leadership and became a totally reactive bureaucracy, with me-too research and marketing. I know this because I did market research for them many years ago.
‘Youth is wasted on the young’.
As an aging almost contemporary, I see more and more truth in that saying. I suppose the big difference in Jobs 2.0 was that he grew up. He learned form his early knocks, shed the bitterness and got on with his life, older and wiser.
As for Apple, by all accounts, the place was out of control and needed a strong hand to get it refocussed. Jobs’ concept of the computer as a ‘digital hub for our increasingly digital world’ was just the thing that allowed them to recreate the company. Everything they did followed from that vision. He also hired a cadre of outstanding lieutenants who are now running the company. I think Apple will continue to prosper and push the boundaries so long as they continue to recognize that technology and design are mutually reinforcing.
Great piece, just great writing. I only had one experience with the “liberal computer;” in my early days with the State of Alaska there were no individual computers. Some of us were what passed for tech savvy enough to use the text editors made for writing COBOL on our dumb terminals as rudimentary word processors. I was one of the few males who could even type with more than two fingers and my appointee level boss very studiedly used the mesh anti-glare screen as a place to display his latest fly-tying creations.
We managed to hold on to some end of year money and one of my co-workers’ husbands knew something about the new Mac. We bought a Mac SE for everyone, and set up a rudimentary network that could somewhat file-share and could talk to a printer. We weren’t cutting edge, for government we were bleeding edge. Most of my computer experience was with CPM machines, in the early ’80s I’d run my business with a 64K NorthStar with a 5 meg harddrive running Wordstar, DbaseII, and Supercalc. Even that rudimentary stuff could make a two or three person office look like a multi-national giant. I’d also had a very early GUI machine during a stint with the US government, but the fed being the fed, we never could really get it operating well. What I like about the Macs was that you could do work without a manual in your lap, what a revolutionary departure; you didn’t need a wall of manuals and the labcoated priests of the mainframe to do work. We kept it going two or three years ’til a new boss came along and announced that the State was to be totally wired. We got the most basic Dells and funky software that during that stint with the government, never really worked very well, but that boss, a Democrat of course, after buying all the computers, servers, network devices etc. for the whole State government left to go straight to work as VP of Governmental Relations for one of the largest computer companies in the World. Ethics Acts only apply to Republicans. Our Macs were last seen in the corner of a conference room before going on the the surplus sale. But, at least we were first.
“…for the now-legendary Macintosh introduction — an event as notable for the press’ complete abandonment of editorial objectivity as for the game-changing new product.” Amen. I was there, too, as a reporter–and found myself standing and cheering along with everyone else. (I wish I still had the t-shirts they gave us in the press packet.) Instead of buying a Mac that day (putting in my order, to be precise), I wish I’d bought stock.
People are comparing him with Henry Ford, but let me quote one of the few other Americans that serve as a reference for Steve Jobs: “Success is 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration.” Like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs failed more than he succeeded, but he learned from every failure and never gave up. Not even the prospect of immediate death deterred him.
HP’s culture lasted for a while after the departure of Bill and Dave, but HP defined (and built) “Old School” – and with that a culture that was not just raw Silicon Valley Cannibalism. I was very fortunate to very briefly work with Dave during the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital fundraising effort, and catch a glimpse of the Old School in action – it was graciousness in motion.
Who at Apple has the keys to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field generator, and how long will it continue to rumble? There are poeple who collect NeXt computers and the BeOs, maybe they have the switch… Steve was inventing The Future in a way that few are today. All’s we get nowadays are stupid Socialist Role Playing enactors with 1930′s-era gas-masks – what’s so “progressive” or Liberal about that crap?
FWIW I’ve been working in IT for 30 years and this is by far the most realistic obit of Steve Jobs I’ve seen. His last 10 years really were”insanely great”. They far outshone his 1970s and 80s accomplishments. Also, props for mentioning Pixar — great tech, great movies, hands-on management when needed, hands-off when not. One thing Mr. Malone might have added … the Apple Stores were a great idea, very well executed. R.I.P.
Jobs was the Colt/Gatling/Mauser/Maxim of the Computer world. Wozniak was the John Moses Browning.
“The Thomas Edison of our time”
He took Apple from obscurity to the top — and after a hiatus he took Apple to the stratosphere and really did change the world. The innovative spirit Jobs possessed and he was able to change the world in such a positive way.
May God Bless his soul, and may he rest in peace.
Sorry Michael. You are completely wrong. Unlike you I’m not in the media. I’ve been working at the coalface of the computer biz for almost 30 years. Writing software for every Apple platforms since the Apple II has taken up a very large part of that career. In a business not known for its lack of nasty dysfunctional people Steve Jobs had a well earned reputation of being probably the nastiest of them all. A truly vile person. A casebook sociopath who ruined many people’s lives and destroyed many good companies. Including I may add Apples desktop platform and its ecosystem. Pretty much all to prove his power over others and to flatter his vanity. NeXT and its utter failure was the true Steve Jobs. Everything else since was just pure blind luck.
You may think that producing a shiny mp3 player or a well packaged cell phone exonerates the many appalling things he did over the years to those he had power over but to me, and to a lot of people who actually work in the business, not too many tears will be shed for the passing of Steven Jobs. If he had retired after being kicked out of Apple in 1986 the world would have been a far better place.
But then you guys in the media would not have had a compelling storyline. Microsoft has always been just, well, so boring. The media myth of Jobs was just a great story to hang those by-lines on. Year after year.
Maybe now that Jobs is dead the media will start telling the story of the extreme lengths that Jobs went to to suppress all negative stories about him or whatever his current business interest was. The very real threats he made against journalists. The careers he tried to ruin. Maybe time to tell the true story that actually Jobs was a fairly despicable man in pretty much all his business dealings. Very much the unacceptable face of capitalism.
We need less people like Steve Jobs in the business. Little more than a very slick hype merchant. A marketing guy who had the media totally supine at his feet. We need far more people like Steve Wozniak, John Warnock and John Walker. Truly great people. People who could actually create great technologies and who could be great successes without feeling the need to ruin or humiliate anyone who did not flatter their egos.
JMC:
May I suggest that you flip through “Infinite Loop” or any of the articles I’ve written about Mr. Jobs over the last 30 years and then tell me if — unlike many of my professional peers — I’ve ever whitewashed the man’s character or lay “supine at his feet.” I also don’t think the hundreds of Apple fans over the years who’ve written to request that I “die in a fire”, etc. would agree with your assessment.
Exactly Mike. I read Infinite Loop when it came out, and most everything else you have ever written about Jobs. This is the first time I think you ever had anything nice to say about him. I kept looking for articles over the past 10 years to see if your stance had softened on him based on his successes.
It did not.
I’m glad that you could finally see the greatness that was inside him, too bad you couldn’t have given him the credit while he was still around to read it.
Karl: I assume that this is the first thing you read by me about Steve Jobs in the last five years. Meanwhile, now that history has confirmed everything I wrote about Jobs’ first tenure at Apple, care to dispute any of my points in Infinite Loop?
Mike,
I made an error and posted a new post instead of a reply, please check out post #25.
I was not referring so much to Infinite Loop (which I bought, and enjoyed reading, when it first came out) but to the tone of the above piece. Its not quite, the utter bastard that was Job Mk 1 had mellowed with age and look at all the brilliant stuff he has done since he “took back” Apple in ’97, which I’ve read elsewhere. But the tone is, in my opinion, still far far too indulgent toward someone who was little more than a brilliant showman with an utterly ruthless ability to suppress every story that did not fit the image he wished to project.
I thank you for being one of the few in the media who did have the balls to write the negative (i.e true) stories about Jobs. Far too few considering Jobs chronic history of exploitation and abuse of those around him. Although your book and Deutschman’s book gave a public airing a lot of the stories that those in the industry (and media) knew there is still a book to be written, updating the story for the last 1
I was not referring so much to Infinite Loop (which I bought, and enjoyed reading, when it first came out) but to the tone of the above piece. Its not quite, the utter bastard that was Job Mk 1 had mellowed with age and look at all the brilliant stuff he has done since he “took back” Apple in ’97, which I’ve read elsewhere. But the tone is, in my opinion, still far far too indulgent toward someone who was little more than a brilliant showman with a profoundly abusive personality and an utterly ruthless ability to suppress every story that did not fit the image he wished to project.
I thank you for being one of the few in the media who did have the balls to write the negative (i.e true) stories about Jobs. Far too few considering Jobs chronic history of exploitation and abuse of those around him and how widely it was known. Although your book and Deutschman’s book gave a public airing to a lot of the stories that those in the industry (and media) knew there is still a book to be written, updating the story for the last 10 years, giving the true (and deeply unflattering) story of Steve Jobs career.
The orgy of uncritical coverage in the media is not unexpected. But you’d think someone of real technical ability, an Edison, had died. Not some glorified marketing guy. Jobs was a computer and phone salesman, for gods sake. Typically it was left to The Daily Telegraph to write the only honest and fair obit I’ve read so far. Not exactly flattering. And stuff you have published about Jobs is quoted indirectly in several spots.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/technology-obituaries/8810037/Steve-Jobs-obituary.html
I’m left wondering if your comment tells me more of Steve Jobs or of you.
You ought to view TNT’s made-for-TV movie “The Pirates of Silicon Valley.” (There’s a version on YouTube somewhere.)
Its portrait of Jobs wasn’t exactly flattering. All the points you made were covered.
But you left out one point: If Wozniak thought he could do better on his own, he would have left Apple and started his own company. That sort of thing happened all the time in Silicon Valley.
Wozniak stuck with Steve. What did he know that you didn’t? Could it be that Wozniak recognized that he couldn’t match Steve’s contribution: Keeping a company true to a vision in the face of economic and competitive pressures not to?
Not all engineers make good businessmen. I think Wozniak recognized his limitations there.
Thanks JMC. I have been wondering if anyone with the knowledge of the Apple prison camp would come forward. Wozniak’s father was right to try and steer his son from Job’s influence. People who cast Jobs as an innovator and inventor miss the point of invention and innovation. Jobs, nor anyone else, at Apple ever invented anything. They used OPT (other people’s technology) and did a better job of packaging and marketing. Personally, the whole I-phone and I-pad thing leaves me cold. Sitting in a business meeting with people fiddling with the phones and tapping their pads means having to put up with more distractions and a lot less productivity. I was forced to use the early MAC’s in my service bureau because Adobe hadn’t made its software available for Windows yet. The crash-a-minute MACs left my tech’s screaming and production at a standstill on many a long night. The new MAC’s seem to be good, but no better than a properly built and programmed Windows machine.
Dear Berlet98,
As someone who grew up in California and knows MANY people who have worked at Apple, nobody would nor should deny that Jobs was a tyrannical narcissist and a monomaniacal SOB.
Sadly, nowhere is it written that genius requires someone to be nice. I do understand how miserable it must have been for you to work for him.
If you think about great inventors or entrepreneurs, most become famous because of one fabulous idea. Ford, Gates, Bell, Pasteur, Marconi, Deforest, Armstrong, etc. Jobs is unique for the quantity of his successes which puts him into Edison territory (assuming we ignore the allegations of patent abuse, dare I say, for both Jobs and Edison).
How many ideas, products, and entire industries did Jobs impact? I know it is hard to be objective when someone is detestable, but what he (Jobs) didn’t do or quashed in development is somewhat irrelevant in the much larger context of what they did launch and Apple’s impact on society in the last 15 years in particular.
For example, Jobs reinvented the PC with the iMac by making it friendly, like a piece of candy. The iMac turned a computer technology into something physical, sexy, and something you may have wanted to lick (at least viscerally). Did you want to lick a Gateway? It looked like a cow…
Jobs took on Disney and changed the film industry. Jobs owned more Disney stock than most of the Disney family at his death due to the value of the acquisition.
Without NeXt, the software platform running Pixar would not have been as efficient, nor the launch of X and a much more stable and superior OS introduced with the iMac. X was a wonderful evolution in software. Sure, purists will say that Unix is/was better, but the fact remains that X was usable and stable for everyone, not just coders.
Look at the radical change in the music industry. Sure, downloads attacked the fringe of the market 15 or so years ago, but it took the iPod and iTunes to create an actual functioning wysiwyg distribution device and supply chain which eroded the one thing that was keeping the value chain liquid for the major music labels. It’s no surprise that the vast majority of record labels folded after the iPod was introduced.
Ask Nokia’s executives (or Finnish politicians now looking at enormous budget holes) what they think about the iPhone. Jobs changed that sector forever – Nokia, a company that had 50% market share in 2007, is in danger of vanishing in the next 5 years.
And look at Border’s books, the iPad was the final nail in the coffin of the book industry. Again, complete and total disruption of a sector much like the iPod introduction.
Now, one could say that Jobs didn’t invent the flash memory algorithms that made the iPod, iPhone, and iPad possible. That distinction goes to the Max Planck institute in Germany. However, anyone could have licensed flash memory technology, Jobs had the vision to KNOW that this technology applied to his vision would move entire industries and change the world.
And that was the essence of Job’s genius. He knew what people would want, and what technology solution would deliver the optimal result to meet that need.
For comparison, look at Sony or Philips. They, before Apple’s run back in 1997, owned the product innovation space. They look like a couple elephants now compared to Apple, and they haven’t had one revolutionary product launch in the last 15 years.
Gates did it once, Google & Facebook? Both are one trick ponies. Dyson now has done the rare, extremely rare feat, of pulling it off twice with the very cool airblade.
How many truly groundbreaking innovations was Jobs responsible for? Ask those in the industries now impacted by disruptive Apple products, or those of us who bought 200 Apple shares in 1996 when rumors were leaking that Jobs was coming back to head the ailing company…and we are eternally grateful to him for doing so.
It is useful to keep in mind two other lessons about the recovery of Apple. First, there was no government bailout. Second there was no union. From the brink of bankruptcy to most valuable company in the world, without government and without unions, just learn from your mistakes, and don’t reward mediocrity (seniority). Not enough businesses have to face that these days. Steve may have been demanding, but maybe we don’t have enough of that these days.
And Apple did it with very little crony capitalism with government. The Windows systems OWNED government’s move to computerization in the late ’80s and into the ’90s. Government computerization was almost exclusively a Dell/Gateway game and Office was and remains the lingua franca of government. If you can’t give good PowerPoint and whip out an Exxel spreadsheet faster ‘n Wyatt Earp, you die in government. Fundamentally, the Windows companies did a better job of bribing government officials and I think that is the unmentioned and, I think, major part of Apple’s decline during the great computer rush of the ’90s.
One day somebody will write objectively about the Y2K scam and the drive to wire every government at every level that drove the “tech bubble” of the ’90s. From a then single guy’s perspective trading a crummy Gateway for the garden of earthly delights that was once the typing pool was even worse than trading the Stewardess for the flight attendent here primarily for your safety; the typing pool was much less expensive!
All you grumblers – here:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/steve-jobs-disability/
I never have seen any value in any Apple product whatsoever. Jobs deserves some appreciation, a true genius at giving strangers what they really wanted: ego boo. His expensive and useless-to-non-designers products fail to inspire me but his wealth creation stands by itself. Now Pixar I think I appreciate. That he could be horrid to many at close range is not surprising most of us me included can become deranged when too powerful or too uncaring to give a hoot about other people in real life, as opposed to in business. A great thief but not on the Madoff model: those whose lives and wealth went to him, they gave voluntarily, and got in return exactly what they asked for. The best cons are straight up, few appreciate that.
All the innovation was stolen from others, particularly from PARC and from Woz. But he sure ran with it farther than anyone else. To me it’s kinda comparable to Mao or to Hitler. Also world-changers; that’s NOT a good thing to be!
There is no way a church like Apple can continue as it has, now that its Jesus/Lucifer is gone. Good riddance. HP at least created useful things….still does once in a while.
And I’ve been in this sorry excuse for an industry since 1966. I’m no Jobs and I sure would not want to be nor be thought of as if I were.
A moronic and classless comment from one embittered due to a life of non-achievement. Apple stole nothing from PARC. Apple paid Xerox with a large amount of Apple stock, which increased in value significantly after it was transferred. This is all documented for people who have the brains to read. Xerox developed the idea of GUI, but had no clue how to commercialize. Steve Jobs instantly saw the possibilities, paid for the intellectual property, hired some of the Xerox engineers, and then changed the world of computer operating systems.
(Steve Jobs is) “… comparable to Mao or to Hitler”. I just can’t take that seriously, but I can see why you’re no Steve Jobs.
Nice article Mike particularly those early years. One quibble. Steve Wozniak was telling that story about Jobs ripping him off years before Jobs returned to Apple. Woz told me the story back when he was running Cloud 9. I have a few stories about Jobs myself.
http://robertholmgren.blogspot.com/
Bob: Actually, as I wrote in the book, Woz first read about Jobs’ rip-off on the national Mac tour in early 1985 from a newly published book on the history of Atari. He reportedly burst into tears at the betrayal. And while he may have told a few people, like you at CL9, it was never public knowledge. Moreover, Woz himself never made the connection between the lost money and the fact that he couldn’t afford an Intel 8086 chip to drive the Apple I, and had to go to a cheap processor instead. The fact that he still managed to build a computer with the budget chip is a testament to his genius, but think how different the history of electronics would have been if the Apple Computer had used an Intel architecture from the beginning. That was Apple’s “Original Sin”, courtesty of Steve Jobs’ deceit . . .and the company paid for it for the next thirty years.
Mike,
The price of the 6052 was $20 and the 8088 was $120. Woz could have bought either one with his share of the Atari cash. Even if he had received his full share, he may not have bought a more expensive processor as he was trying to make his computer as cheaply as possible. Also, I read that Woz was using the 6800 as a reference anyway (he thought it was better than the 8088) so, if he did go with a more expensive processor it probably would have been the 6800. On top of this, it wasn’t the Intel processor that sold IBM PC’s. It was the fact that they had the letters I B M on the box. My best friend’s father was in management at IBM when the PC was released. He got one of the first ones on an employee purchase plan. (with every piece of available software written for it) Lets just say the software collection was underwhelming – but it was an IBM and it sold.
When the Mac came out and it’s hardware / OS was much more advanced – no one cared. If IBM had made the Mac, it would have sold like gangbusters and had every developer out there creating software for it. Apple made it and it wasn’t able to take off like the PC. I’m not sure your “original sin” argument holds water.
BTW – How old was Jobs when this happened? 19? 20? Did you ever do something stupid when you were a teenager? Would you like it thrown in your face until the day you died?
Karl:
You’re not taking into account the lag time between when Jobs got paid by Atari’s Bushnell (after taking full credit for Woz’s work) and when Woz finally bought the microprocessor for the Apple I. As the legend goes, Jobs sold his VW bus and Woz his HP-65 to buy the parts for their first computer. And Woz in fact bought the 6502 for $10 (out of an aquarium filled with them!) in a special sale at Wescon. This underscores just how financially straitened the two boys were at this point — that extra grand or more would have been quite useful for Woz in his design work. As for him trying to build the cheapest computer possible — that’s absurd for 1976. Woz was just trying to build the best computer he could to show off to the Homebrew guys, and would have bought the best microprocessor he could afford: either a 8086 or a real 6800. Instead, he was literally reduced to buying the cheapest clone available.
As for making mistakes at 19 I still regret: you bet. But I never exploited my best friend, took all credit for his work, AND ripped him off on the pay.
That said, if this was the one such act of Steve Jobs’ youth, it would indeed be forgotten (it almost was, as Jobs never did tell Woz what he’d done). But even you must admit that it was part of a larger pattern of behavior, largely unchecked because of his fame and power, that characterized Steve Jobs in his early years. I’m sorry that you don’t like the reality of Steve in that era, but at least give me credit for honestly reporting it, rather than going into the tank for Apple like most of the media (ahem, Newsweek).
As for Steve Jobs II, I’ve tried to always give him credit for his extraordinary achievement, as I did in this appreciation piece.
It’s fascinating to hear perspectives that most of us don’t have access to. How many other people learned of Jobs’ passing on a device he created? He made a permanent impact on our lives. RIP http://bit.ly/p0UB9h
Yes, I care to dispute your MAIN point. In Infinite Loop I felt that you (over and over) pushed the point that it was the character of Hewlett and Packard that made their company great, (even years after they left) and it was the character of Jobs that made Apple fail. Now that HP changes CEOs like a pair of socks and Apple has become the largest market cap company in the world, The last few years I’ve been waiting for you to post a retraction and simply admit you were wrong. After he passes, I get my wish in the title of your article here: Having spent much of my life dealing with the Steve Jobs phenomenon, I can say that it was only in the last few years that he became the great figure he was always destined to be.”
WAS ALWAYS DESTINED TO BE? That is not what I got from Infinite Loop, and I wish you would have told him that while he was still alive.
P.S. As far as what you have written over the past 5 years? Yes, you have thrown him some back-handed compliments in your articles. (That must have been painful) Of course, you also called him a “Monster” just months ago. Even in your final piece (the kindest you have ever written) you can’t stop yourself from digging at him.
What I wonder now is with the crony capitalism and over regulation today, will it still be possible for the next Jobs to even arise?
Hey Mike —
Just a general thanks at this time when the world has paused to take stock of technology and its place in the world over the last 35 years. You’ve been toiling away for the whole period, and we’re grateful that you’ve been there all along to help us make sense of what ultimately is a very unique and very odd Silicon Valley culture.
Wow. That was unexpected. Thanks for your kind words, CMC. That was an “unexpected appreciation” on your part . . .
–Mike Malone
My best friend’s mom makes $77 an hour on the computer. She has been out of
job for 9 months but last month her check was $7487 just working on the
computer for a few hours. Read about it here NuttyRich dot com
Steve Jobs. May He R.I.P. and May FNC Continue to Celebrate His Life
The untimely death of Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs after a heroic battle against pancreatic cancer at the far too young age of 56 represents an incalculable loss for America and the world.
A technological, innovative genius who has been rightfully compared to Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, even to Leonardo DaVinci, Jobs deserves all those accolades. He transformed how we communicate, compute, and think. He and the technological marvels he would have introduced will be sorely missed.
What won’t be missed is the politicizing of the circumstances of his birth.
Almost as unfortunate as his passing is the media’s studied effort, not to imagine a world without Steve Jobs’ countless contributions which imagining has been explored in depth, but not to imagine a world without Steve Jobs. He came close to never being born.
Fox News was the only member of the media to dare mention the proximity he came to being aborted fifty six years before his life began and Fox has been pilloried for that mention.
In brief, Jobs’ biological parents, Joanne Schieble, an American grad student and Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim immigrant, didn’t want a child for a variety of reasons and considered aborting the future genius. They scrapped that option, also for a variety of reasons, and chose instead to place their baby for adoption. He was adopted and reared by Paul and Clara Jobs who encouraged his ingenuity. The rest is history.
That history cannot be refuted anymore than it can be refuted that had Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah John Jandali decided aborting their baby wasn’t the proper path to follow. The extreme leftist organization, MediaMatters.com, differed, implicitly on the birth parents’ decision, explicitly on Fox News decision “to use his death to try to score political points.”
Two days after his death, in a snarky article titled, “In Steve Jobs Eulogy, Fox Tries to Score Political Points,” George Soros’ Media Matters didn’t precisely spell out which political points were scored on Fox’s “The Five” but presumably was suggesting that the contentious issue of abortion is a political issue.
Except to the left wing, abortion is no more a matter of politics than life itself. However, as conservative writer Ann Coulter has aptly pointed out, abortion is a virtual sacrament to liberals and anyone who disagrees with that disturbed view is an evil transgressor of political correctness.
“The Five” host Greg Gutfield evidently disagrees as does fellow panelist Kimberly Guilfoyle. Media Matters’ Solange Uwimana proceeded to score her own points . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5667.)
People Say the Darndest Things, Part Two
. . . For example, with Steve Jobs’ body barely cold, Gawker.com punctured numerous holes in the popular conception of the legacy and the persona of the man whose genius has been compared with DaVinci, Edison, and Einstein.
In brief, Gawker delved into “the dark side of Steve Jobs and the company he founded.”
While praising his innovation and achievement in “What Everyone Is too Polite to Say about Steve Jobs,” Gawker rips virtually everything else about him and Apple Inc.
Gawker contends that the innovative achiever was a tyranical, mean-spirited employer who publicly humiliated underlings, that Apple unfairly repressed information and competition, was guilty of knowingly violating child labor laws and human rights by establishing ”sweat shops” in China, that Jobs’ personal life was something of a mess, and he and his company were stingy with their billions.
Those are some darned harsh things to say, even if they are true.
Americans are accustomed to politicians uttering the darndest things–cynics would call them lies–especially during an election campaign and the current re-election campaign which began the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected president is no exception.
Still, some utterances by the POTUS–the president–and the FLOTUS–his wife stagger the imagination as much for the repetitive nature of their truth-stretching as for the pair’s blithe disregard for honesty.
Call them falsehoods, fabrications, misstatements, or the less-politic lies, our president has accumulated legions of them, few if any of which have been reported by his mainstream media.
Obama’s most recent mendacity was obviously intended tug at the heartstrings of a major constituency, public school teachers, at the same time he was trying to pull at congressional purse strings to get more billions to waste on his “jobs bill.”
At a pseudo-White House press conference on Friday, pseudo since it was really just another campaign stop, Obama cited a well-credentialed but jobless teacher Robert Baroz whom the president said he had met. As pointed out by BostonHerald.com, the president fudged the whole thing. He never met Baroz and Baroz isn’t unemployed at all, unless Boston’s K-8 Curley School in Jamaica Plain is paying him in error.
Ever true to his union and to Obama, Baroz dismissed the fudging as a mere oversight and still fully supports the president. True to their dedication to his re-election, not a soul in the MSM called Obama on his misrepresentations at the presser and once again skated away from his lies.
No stranger to prevarications, First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama also pulled a swifty last week at a Rhode Island fundraiser raising funds for, what else, her hubby’s re-election, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5649.)
“Steve Jobs Dies, Apple Products Stop Working”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyP4Nu-_p6I
Millions of Apple products, including iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Mac computers, suddenly stopped working on Wednesday when Apple founder Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer late that night. Apple issued a statement saying that they are working ’round the clock to devise and implement a solution, though they said it is proving difficult to devise and implement anything very successfully without their genius leader.