Apple Co-Founder’s Allies Take Aim at Hollywood Over ‘Steve Jobs’
wsj.com
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http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...
Steve Jobs' defenders on the other hand aren't bringing up many stellar character examples. This is a problem for a company that needs "demigod personality" as the face of their brand. Your milage may vary.
(Edit typos and grammar corrected)
Do you spend what may be a short amount of time that you have left on trying to build a foundation to give your wealth away, or do you spend it doing what you enjoy most? Jobs gets viciously and unfairly criticized on this point. If other people ('normal people') choose to pursue what they want to with their remaining time in the face of such a diagnosis, few would dare criticize them.
That becomes an even more important question when you realize that Jobs knew his wife would be fully capable of giving his wealth away after his passing. In the second half of his cancer battle, it was pretty obvious he was not going to survive longer term. So what do you do at 52 or 53 years of age, when it's apparent you're going to die? Do you spend years (which you may not have) trying to build a successful foundation? My personal opinion is that's an absurd premise. The reality is, we'll never know if Jobs would have become a successful philanthropist, or whether he would have focused on his work as Buffett has and leave the giving to eg his wife.
If Bill Gates had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer at 48, and died in his early to mid 50s - it's likely his legacy would look a lot different too. When Gates was 48 in 2003, his public reputation was far different than it is today, he was openly reviled as an abusive monopolist and robber baron with a long reputation for having been mean and abusive to employees.
It's Steve's vast billions that will be given away by Laurene, and he deserves a lot of credit for that, as much as someone like Warren Buffett does for the good his wealth will do. I don't see many examples of Jobs getting a comparable treatment versus what someone like Buffett does on this point however.
edit: if you care to, feel free to explain why you disagree with me, assuming it's not just based on a reflexive need to bash Steve Jobs and not give him credit for any of the good his wealth will do and or has done (while someone like Buffett gets a lot of credit, while performing almost none of the actual philanthropic effort either)
For some people (like me), he isn't anything more. Jobs and Gates were both rather disruptive people. Gates held the entire computer industry back, technologically, and abused his employees to stash wealth. What he does with ill-gotten gains is well and good from an absolute standpoint (no eye toward history), but the damage he did on his watch, doesn't make up for the relatively short-term altruism he has shown. Saving 10 or 100k lives via water treatment and scholarships or sabotaging technological innovation for decades, is not equivalent to me. It's immoral for Gates to take from others so he could make the decision of where that time and to what end to spend some of his lifetime of hoarded wealth.
I think there are a lot of people who share a similar perspective.
For every Gates and Jobs, there are many other equally talented programmers and marketers who were not and will not be as lucky as these two.
But if these other talented programmers and marketers conducted themselves in the manner of Gates and Jobs, would anyone forgive them?
It's tempting to retort with some rhetorical rationale like "the ends justify the means," but then no one has any proof that behaving like Gates or Jobs has any causal link to the level of success they experienced.
Microsoft and today's Apple are what they are. Some people love these companies' products. The word "cult" is sometimes used and people get quite defensive about their computer preferences, too. Effective marketing I guess.
But not everyone has been so impressed.
For people in the later group, there is little reason to celebrate Gates or Jobs, unless one is on the receiving end of some of their cash, whereby it can be put to beneficial use.
The industry does this job well by itself, I doubt things would be much different if Microsoft wasn't around.
> What he does with ill-gotten gains
Yet all transactions that contributed to his gains were voluntary.
> later came to regret the deal they entered - specifically that MSFT got a cut of all shipped machines regardless of whether their OS was installed.
Then they should've developed their own OS, as they were completely free to do.
The man-hours wasted working around the bugs with Fat32 and NetBIOS and the slew of broken MS implementations can never be recovered. MS Office is STILL an endearing testament to what has been spent cradling flawed MS technological choices. The idea that the world would be the same without MS is nonsensical. The question is if we would have developed things like VMs a decade before (we would have through Sun filling those gaps with their existing tech). Maybe Sun would have burned down anyway, but that's besides the point.
> Yet all transactions that contributed to his gains were voluntary.
They were often coerced. They were tried and convicted in multiple arenas, for abuse of the de-facto monopoly.
Where does this revisionist thinking get incubated?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/laurene-powell-jobs...
The Gates family name is plastered everywhere. Buildings on the University of Washington campus, the name of their foundation. That puts into doubt his true motivations. He seems to like amassing things: fortune, and now legacy. I'm sure he's also quite motivated to reform his image.
I'm glad Gate's is spending his ill-gotten gains on social and health causes. That doesn't mean he deserves praise. He is sacrificing nothing. He lives just as luxuriously, but now he also gets to luxuriate in all the adoration of his "generosity".
Who deserves more admiration, Bill Gates giving away money he can't really spend on himself anyway, from the comfort of his 60,000 sq ft mansion with a 2,500 sq ft gym, a 60 ft pool, and a 23-car garage filled with exotic cars? Or the person who decides against a lucrative career path to be a public school teacher with the meager pay and little thanks? Or the doctors who volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, often working in dangerous places, when they could be using that time to rake in more money at home?
It's that the Gates Foundation is successfully getting things done. At least, that's the impression I get after reading their annual letters. It's not a typical charity where it's all about helping people today (giving out food, medical service, etc.). It's about changing things so things will get improved. So things like bringing in new types of crops to Africa - that kind of thing might make a real impact forever.
And even more interesting is that his money isn't enough. He cannot buy solutions to these problems. 50 or 100BN just isn't a ton of money on a global scale, to e.g. immunize a billion people.
> He is sacrificing nothing.
This is utter wank. He sacrifices his working life - he spends a lot of time working on the foundation and pushing philanthropic goals. That's far from 'nothing'.
> Who deserves more admiration
Why is it a competition?
I think people who feel a relationship to Steve Jobs are doing what they are accusing other of, making him into someone he wasn't.
Laws of luxury branding from L2 Digital, Scott Galloway Professor NYU Stern:
"...Apple: Apple has the pillars of a luxury brand: craftsmanship, an iconic founder, an exceptional price point, vertical control of distribution, globally recognizable, and with a self-expressive benefit. It’s on it way to becoming the world’s largest luxury brand with the help of former Burberry and YSL CEOs Angela Ahrendts and Paul Deneve. ..."
http://www.l2inc.com/the-four-horsemen-amazonapplefacebook-g...
http://recode.net/2015/10/02/original-mac-team-member-andy-h...
He's become a weird cliche parody of himself, where every character has the exact same diction and incredible grammar and rapid fire wit. It's like dozens of different actors channeling the ghost of Josh Lyman.
Forgot about accuracy, treat it as a work of fiction and be surprised if it just doesn't suck as a film.
I'm not positive, but I'm willing to bet Cook was talking more about "Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine" with that comment. That movie was a documentary and was quite critical of Steve Jobs.
Besides him being horrible to the mother of Lisa...the other unpleasant episode that comes to mind is how he cheated Woz even before Apple began...this is a thing so small and so long past the time that Woz and Jobs became legends and yet Jobs, rather than not admitting what he did, doubles up and points out how Woz would be nothing if Jobs hadn't brought him on to Apple. Isaacson devoted a substantial part of the early chapters to this episode:
> Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus.
> “I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.”
> To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you know, people are different.” When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that he would remember it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled.
> When I asked Jobs directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”
> Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,” Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the details of this one, the $ 350 check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn.
> “I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there was a bonus for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”
As always, Woz demonstrated his near-infinite compassion and wisdom when Isaacson pressed him on Jobs' deception:
> Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing. Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it pass,” he said when I pressed the point. “It’s not something I want to judge Steve by.”
Now list the mistakes you've made in your life and let's see how you compare...
Let Jobs screw Wosniak, take his idea (US Festivals) and pass it off on the music industry, borrow money from Gates, steal from Parc and try to shut down streaming music comapnies while stepping in front of the line for a liver he never used. Not interested.
I like what Google is doing 10000000000000000x better: Google's Company That Wants To Cure Death Now Has Its Own Website http://www.businessinsider.com/calico-website-google-curing-...
Anyone trying to create things should study Jobs, and anyone who does study him (with an open mind) will come away with a profound respect for him as a creator and as a person.
As Elon Musk said, "there was a certain magic about Steve Jobs that was really inspiring"
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things...
Most people who worked with Steve Jobs consider it a highlight of their professional careers. He was as demanding of himself as he was of others, and worked as hard as anyone. These are some of the traits that the assholes don't copy.