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Comment by flavio81 | Hacker News Reader

The young Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded, because of being unbearable to his team, not to mention internally sabotaging the Lisa team (and contribuing to the failure of the Apple III by very stupid frivolous decisions.) See "folklore.org" for first-hand account.

The initial success of the Apple computer i'd atttribute more to Wozniak for knowing what the hobby computer should be. The original macintosh wasn't a sales success and sales only took off after Steve was fired and the business strategy was reviewed.

The "version 2.0" Steve Jobs that returned to Apple was an improved person, but I simply wouldn't take any advice from the younger SJ.

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He was fired because he gave up control of his company and for no other reason. Founders don't get fired because employees find them unbearable or sabotaging. Those employees get fired or quit...unless the founder gives up control and then loses an internal political fight.

The sentiment among most early employees was that Steve Jobs was like a good coach: you hated him at the time but look back proudly at what he pushed you to accomplish.

There was no Apple Computers at all without Steve Jobs, and definitely no commercial product like the Apple II. Wozniak had no independent ambition to create a company whatsoever. Wozniak played a vital role but primarily as a perfect catalyst for Jobs.

The Macintosh saved Apple and the foolish "young Steve Jobs" is the only reason it was a great enough product to do that. Jobs did not even have control over pricing or sales of the Macintosh, and so blaming his flawed "business strategy" makes no sense. The people that fired him lived off his work for a decade, and did none of their own work at all.

Yes, Jobs had some growing up to do, and firing him probably did help him do that, but the idea that he was a fool that became great is a total myth. He was always great, as can be seen from the work he did.

> He was fired because he gave up control of his company and for no other reason.

That's not true. The Macintosh in its early years was severely underpowered and expensive, and the Apple II hardware was driving the revenue of the company.

Jobs wanted to shift all the marketing spend onto the Macintosh as well as drop the price to below cost, and caused a crisis with the board of diretors who ended up firing him.

Jobs had the same problem with overambitious hardware at NeXT. They couldn't even sell enough NexT machines to universities and the enterprise because they were still expensive to produce and underpowered, and had to stop making hardware and lay people off.

Moore's Law didn't catch up with the vision until the mid 90s, and luckily he and NexT's operating system were brought back into the fold at Apple then.

> Moore's Law didn't catch up with the vision until the mid 90s, and luckily he and NexT's operating system were brought back into the fold at Apple then.

This is exactly what people don't understand. Jobs had a dream computer and he was adamant on making it. First time he got fired because of it. Second time he became immensely successful because of the same dream.

This is case of perfect hindsight. It's easy to think he was great because second time around he became crazy successful. Nobody is willing to admit that he was repeating the same strategy and failing at it until luck worked in his favour. His rehiring at Apple when NextStep was failing. And then at Apple he got John Ive and team. And finally evolution of technologies like powerful and efficient processors, touch screens, high density storage etc allowed that dream to be realized finally.

He and his company was the first one to bring many great things to the mass market, because he was constantly pushing ahead of his time. NextStep was most of the core of Mac OS X. without NextStep, Mac OS X and the hardware that ran it would have flopped

Apple could have bought BeOS, or used their Linux distribution as a base for the next Mac OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux

>He was fired because he gave up control of his company and for no other reason.

Gave up control or lost control?

>Founders don't get fired because employees find them unbearable or sabotaging. Those employees get fired or quit...unless the founder gives up control and then loses an internal political fight.

see Kalanick, founders don't get fired because of employees, they get fired because of they can't keep their board loyal to them. This was the case with Steve Jobs as well.

Jobs' return to Apple in 1997, he made sure that 4 new board members were appointed[0], which you can be sure were loyal to him first and foremost.

He lost control of his company the first time around, learned from his mistakes and corrected. There is no need to glorify his early mistakes, they don't diminish his accomplishments.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/1997/08/06/technology/apple/

Yeah this was my first thought. This video feels a lot like a lesson on how not to build a great tech team.

Apple was a super-hyped company in the 80s with a very successful IPO, so hiring the best wasn't exactly difficult for them. Instead, it feels like they were filtering out people who may have brought diversity of thought and perhaps helped them avoid some of the critical mistakes that led to the failures of V1 of Apple.

Curious - what part of what Steve Jobs says in the interview doesn't make sense to you?

THe premise of this video is that what he says is interesting because its steve jobs whos saying it.. theres that authority built into it. It makes sense to attack his authority as a response to this video, thats not fallacious I don't think. Most of what hes saying isnt backed up by evidence (I mean that hes not citing stats, not that the science falls against him), even if some of it makes sense.

Humans like safety, humans like success, steve jobs seemed to have save success, so the fallacy goes, that by being a behavioral copy cat, i can become a save success.

If you are afraid and think by behavior copy pasting you will solve this problem, instead of going the hard way, of analyzing risks and doing the actual blood, sweat and tears involved with risky moves - you are already set up to fail. Bonus Points on spectacular failure, if you also do the very same moves in a niche that already has a huge company set up in it.

No what he is saying is if you have passionate people then they will rise to the occasion.

The evidence is to find companies with a lot of people who hate the company but work for the paycheck and see if the company is successful or heading to the dumpster. Then find companies built by HR who puts only the employees with the best fit into positions and see if they are heading to the dumpster (because HR weeds out the passionate people who have weak or poorly written resumes) I would say yes to both.

not to mention not understanding how to price tech products by the Apple Computer TOp staff

they were talking about that one girl as an unlikely manager, but she had an mba from stanford

I think she was a woman.

An unlikely manager of technologists. She wasn't an engineer.

Debby was the controller for the Mac project, like a CFO, which meant pricing and planning production and the factory. She ended up becoming CFO of Apple and a CEO of a Tektronix spinoff later in her career.

Of Jobs she said, “He would shout at a meeting, 'You asshole, you never do anything right.' It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him."

thats more of a recent thing, and more of a google thing. i was going to say I dont know the route apple took, but then again we do know, they did the norm: MBA.

Either way, at any company in the world just about, taking a stanford mba (even at google) is not a unlikely success story.

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