The Man Who Sold the Future
Universities are always awash with bright (and, let’s be honest, not-so-bright) kids who claim they want to “change the world.” Vanishingly few of them have the abilities to do anything of the sort, and still fewer have the innate drive and relentless, adamantine will to see their personal visions through to reality. Almost none actually succeed at changing even their own immediate surroundings, much less the world.
Steve Jobs was one of the infinitesimally tiny group to see that youthful ideal through. In the space of 35 years, Jobs, the on-and-off-and-on-again founder and leader of Apple, changed the way the world works, plays, communicates, listens to music, and watches movies — to say nothing of changing movies themselves, in his “spare time” job as CEO of Pixar.
Grasping the totality of Jobs’ life and accomplishments defies any short account. When Jobs started working in the tech field, as a teenaged summer hire at Hewlett-Packard (he got the job by cold-calling William Hewett, scrounging for hobby-project parts), personal computers weren’t even a blip on the horizon and the internet existed only as a crude, text-based network between defense bases and universities. Telephones were black, rotary, and run by a monolithic monopoly. Video games didn’t exist (Jobs was hired by the nascent Atari a few years later; he proceeded to design the seminal game “Breakout”), music came from vinyl records, and animation was something done laboriously by hand on endless sheets of plastic.
Not long after, Jobs founded Apple, and became the driving force in creating the personal computer, helping build out the massive industries supporting that technology and also fundamentally changing virtually every other industry on the planet. That alone would constitute one of the more impressive legacies in human history, but Jobs didn’t stop there, even after being ousted from Apple in a 1985 corporate coup.
Many pixels and much ink will — justifiably — be spilled this week celebrating Jobs’ legendary sense of style and intense focus on perfecting the user experience, but I suspect another vital key to Jobs’ success will be overlooked, namely his genius for locating and recruiting brilliant people. For all his fame as a tech guru, Jobs was far from an accomplished engineer and had little formal technical training. His real brilliance lay more in indentifying people with extraordinary gifts — Steve Wozniak, Jef Raskin, Jonathan Ive, John Lasseter, to name just a few from a vast list of geniuses — and then pushing, cajoling, haranguing them until the end product was closer to a meticulously-perfected work of art than just another throw-away lump of consumer plastic.
Jobs was no saint. Tales of his short temper and blistering rants directed at subordinates were legendary. When I spent a few months as an Apple phone support drone after finishing college, the old-timers there who’d known Jobs in his first run as “Employee 0” shuddered at the mention of his name — but that was 1993, when Apple’s stock price was around $15, and practically nobody expected the company to survive long enough to see the 21st century.
Apple without Jobs was just another clueless corporation. The revolving door of CEOs tried everything the management books recommended, turning the scruffy start-up into something much closer to the buttoned-town, hierarchical IBM, which for decades was considered the ideal computer company. Sales dropped even as the product line ballooned, with dozens of computers you couldn’t tell apart even if you worked there, and rare successful new products died stillborn because the company couldn’t manufacture enough of them in time to meet demand.
With Jobs, who was recalled in 1996 as the company faced extinction, Apple was something else entirely. Jobs’ second life at Apple was built on the lessons learned during his long exile. His first acts were to strip away the mass of committee-approved flawed products and failed initiatives that had collected around Apple like so many barnacles: Out went the bizarrely-differentiated computer lines, replaced by a simple lineup of iMacs and iBooks for consumers and PowerMacs and PowerBooks for “pros.” Out went the once revolutionary but now obsolete MacOS, in came the Jobs-fostered OS X. Out went the loved-by-techies Mac clones, out went the superfluous printer division, out went the collected detritus of a decade and a half of IBM- and Microsoft-imitating management.
Will, your headline was dead-opposed to PJM/Tatler ideology:
Namely, Steve Jobs was a foresighted & fabulously successful business leader who:
(1) Appreciated that AGW was real, serious, and accelerating.
(2) Pulled Apple out of the US Chamber of Commerce over the issue.
(3) Appointed Al Gore to Apple’s Board of Directors
(4) Then both Steve and Al proceeded to make tons of money in the free market.
This ain’t a path that PJM/Tatler wants American voters to approve, eh?
Though frankly, to me Steve Jobs’ responsible path to wealth seems kinda good.
No doubt, PJM/Tatler’s AGW skeptics will hilariously reverse-spin Jobs’ strategy!
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Apple quits Chamber of Commerce, praised for green efforts
URL: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/10/apple-quits-chamber-of-commerce-praised-for-green-efforts.ars
As the article has shown, Jobs, like all of us, was not perfect. The fact that he was very good within his core competency does not guarantee brilliance in other areas.
Henry Ford changed the world, but was an anti-Semite who was admired by Hitler.
Thomas Edison changed the world, but he viciously fought Tesla’s and Westinghouse’s superior AC technology by making false claims about it being dangerous.
“(4) Then both Steve and Al proceeded to make tons of money in the free market.”
Steve earned his money by providing consumers with great products, but what exactly did Al do for consumers to earn his? How is a government mandated tax on carbon a “free” market? All Al did was skim some of that money for himself.
There is no need to reverse-spin anything, hilariously or otherwise. Rational people are able to appreciate talent in one area, while recognizing that does not make them flawless in others.
What I find hilarious are the global warming believers who claim scientific superiority, (like “a physicist”) even as the “evidence” they base their “science” on continues to fall like dominoes.
p.s. I work in R&D, and have known physicists who would not know how to fix a flat tire.
Unlike Bill Gates or Andrew Carnegie before him, Steve Jobs was no philanthropist.
In the end, Gates donated half his fortune to charity.
Jobs did nothing comparable.
Does that disqualify Jobs from your idea of a “responsible path to wealth”?
Physicist, I wrote the title for this one, but can’t take credit for the tag line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon
Steve Jobs is and always will be a legend. There are critics out there who think that the company has now been left vunerable an people will expect apple to go down hill. However, I am certain that Jobs prepared for this and there is a treasure chest of his greatest ideas that will soon be born!!
http://www.whichestateagency.com
I hope your right, oh how I hope your right
ideas thought up by a group of people hired to think are not often very good. what is good is one person with a good idea and a bunch of smart people who will do what they are told.
That wsa Apple, lets see if it can stay that way.
OK I’m over simplefying, but you all know what I mean. Comities just don’t cut it. A leade is hard to find, someone willing to say, this is it, do this !
I’m guessing that the title of this post is derived from the Heinlein story “The Man Who Sold the Moon”??
David, it is.
I don’t know whether Steve Jobs ever said it, but I think getting fired was one of the best things that could have happened to him. Call it the difference between Steve Jobs the immature visionary and Steve Jobs the effective visionary. Experience is the best teacher and unpleasant experiences teach best. (provided you have the wit to learn the lessons)
His sabbatical from Apple allowed technology to catch up to his vision of what was possible.
Common, enough with the drum banging; I have yet to meet anyone who really understood the times they lived in much less knew what tomorrow would bring, and the “best and the brightest” certainly have their problems with myopia and group think. Seems to me life has gotten even more complicated since the opening paragraph to a Tale Of Two Cities was written: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. “
Don, you have to remember that Charles Dickens was a flaming liberal.
To the social conservatives of Dickens’ era, social problems had one simple solution: the poor classes should shut up and be grateful for their merciful lords and king.
That’s why America’s founders would have been huge fans of Monty Python!
——————————————-
Monty Python- The Annoying Peasant
“Supreme executive authority derives from a mandate
of the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony!”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA
The “conservatives” of his day were what today we would call reactionaries or paleoconservatives, seeking to preserve the privileges of favored groups — in fact, they have more in common with the lib-left New Class gentry than with, say, the Tea Party.
The liberals and progressives of his day — who believed in equality of opportunity and before the law, as well as in technical and scientific progress empowering man — would be called conservatives in today’s America.
As for the “Gaia ueber alles” and equality-of-outcome crowds, they are truly neo-Marxists or neo-Jacobins who seek power under the false flag of an impossible outcome. Free people are not equal, and equal people cannot be free.
He made gadgets, boys and girls. Fun stuff, but also just another snare…something which should only be taken in small doses. My prayers for his immortal soul, my hope that people will learn to turn the gadgets off 22 hours a day.
He didn’t make gadgets at first. Back in 1970s and 80s he did the great work of bringing computers to the masses, making them personal. In that he was helped (if you take away for a moment the view that those were competitors) by Commodore, Sinclair, IBM and others.
It was only in the last decade of his life that he turned his back on his worthy path and started with all that ‘post-PC’ stuff, gadgets being one of the characteristic manifestations of that new focus. He turned his back on empowering the computer user in lots of other ways too, like his $99 licensing fee for developing for iOS (pay to develop for a platform?!), and his tightly shut hardware. The OS X kernel is open, but little around it is, and Macintosh hardware has always been notoriously hard to open to peek under the hood.
The Steve Jobs of 1977 was so different than himself thirty years later. Considering the control-freakishness Apple employees have attested to during both tenures of his, the open hardware and software of the Apple II must have been a quirk, a concession to the times. From the moment Apple started suing other companies for the look and feel of the GUI, as good as saying, ‘We can steal it from Xerox but nobody else can’, it was all downhill. Snob appeal, marketed as ‘excellent design’ and ‘artistry dedicated to every tiny detail’, has been Apple’s flagship product.
He ruined it. Worst of all, everyone else had to follow him.
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.)
Steve Jobs was a developer of environments. His comrade in history is not the inventor of the plow or the printing press but the inventor of the farm or the port. The first person who came up with banking or a market place or a port and built one was his predecessor.
You miss an earth shaking one in your recount of Steve Jobs accomplishments. That is the NEXT after he was thrown out of Apple Steve Jobs built a network centric computer with a minicomputer’s computational capacity but practically no local storage. Every engineer who looked at it at the time said that a trillion dollars would have to be spent to bring the networks up to making the computer useful but the CERN a massive European Particle Physics Lab already had the internal network that everyone will have in 2040. Tim Barns-Lee at the CERN got the NEXT computer and proceeded to debug the Hypertext Markup Language to the point that he could operate the World Wide Web across the Internet.
The Internet had been around since the 1969 development of ARPANET and Reagan had freed it for commercial development in 1985 but it was the bricks and mortar of the NEXT computer provided the physical frame work that made the WWW possible in 1992. This is something of a Steve Jobs world that we just live in. His short coming was that he knew where he wanted to go and could recognize people like himself who would also go there.
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.)
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 LazyCash4.com