Steve Jobs Worked on Apple Until His Last Day
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
It makes for one hell of a story; but, I think the better story is to think of a man who spent his last 24 hours alive with those closest to him--his family.
There's no doubt in my mind that the liver transplant was directly necessitated by his pancreatic cancer.
Given that Cook no doubt knew Steve was about to die, I don't think it's reasonable to think he would tell the truth. Just imagine what he might have said if he had.
Being a flower is much more important than being great, and most of the time works better than being charitable.
The only thing I could say he gave in charity was his time, I know that after diagnosed with cancer the last thing I would have done is keep working, especially if i was in the same financial bracket as him. Regardless tho he worked on until the day he died, that alone gets my respect regardless of the great things he done prior to his death......RIP
I'm pretty sure someone's taking the piss, but I won't be completely certain until I start hearing reports to the effect that his last words were "I wish I'd spent more time at the office".
I'm so tired of all these Steve Jobs posts. Please stop with them. Dennis Ritchie did far more than Steve Jobs for hackers. And if this really was Hacker News we would be talking about his contributions instead of Steve's.
Is it because Jobs was rich while Ritchie was just a researcher? Is that why you folks care about him more? Is it because he was more visible and presentable?
These aren't very Hackerish reasons in my opinion. But they probably explain why this community is more interested in Jobs than in Ritchie.
It's mainly people claiming that Dennis Ritchie did not get the attention he deserved. But I have also seen Steve Jobs' fans defending the attention he got because of the ways he changed the world.
To both parties: STOP TRYING TO CHEAPEN THE DEATH OF ONE OF THESE MEN BY COMPARING THEM TO THE OTHER.
We can't vote up what isn't submitted, and we can't submit what doesn't exist. If you're aware of more articles about Ritchie than what you've seen here, please submit them!
Will it be loved by millions? Probably. But, seriously, it's just a phone.
I guess I don't get it.
Instead, he built NeXT, Pixar and then later, rebuilt Apple.
I think that his continuing to work is the most charitable act I've observed in my lifetime. He touched billions of people and made their lives better.
Sure, he got richer doing it, but it seems he never did it for the money. (I think he did it for the pleasure, personally, but the end result was massive human good.)
This is why I honor Steve Job's life.
Really? I doubt he did any of the stuff for our express benefit. Steve had a personal drive to produce good products, to achieve his personal goals, and he did that really well and is rightly admired for pursuing his internal drive and making it such a success.
Was his drive mainly for altruistic reasons? For the benefit of mankind? Come on - I'm all for admiring the guy, but let's not fawn over him. He's not a saint. If he is, I guess all those mega-rich CEOs of the Samsungs, Ford, General Electics of the world are also so admirable because they 'charitably' continue to work when they financially don't need to.
He's not a guy who took his millions and invested it in the questionably useful products of Wall Street. Instead, he built things that people loved. That doesn't make him a saint, but I think it makes him someone worthy of respect.
I totally agree about respect - but respect is not charity. Charity refers to noble goals/intentions - Steve 'only' built great products - those products are great - but there is nothing inherently noble about them.
If the OP had said Bill Gates is amazingly charitable - I would be more inclined to agree. Bill Gates has worked to make the world a better place and has self-sacrificed his wealth to help others. Steve did none of that - Steve is incredibly entrepreneurial and deserves boatloads of respect - but don't say his actions where charitable.
Microsoft's market position was hugely enhanced by them illegally using one captive market to create another. They forced up prices for their customers and forced competitors out of business by illegal means.
So yeah, he's giving away lots of money, but to me it's stolen money. That's not charity.
I was very much "against" MS in those days, but looking back on it now, I feel like it was the beginning of a big part the modern web/software business model.
It's not "stolen," just because we don't like how he earned it. Committing to give away one's entire fortune - and actually doing it - is hugely generous, our feelings about MS aside. It is very much charity.
Microsoft were barred from compulsory bundling with Windows after bundling that essentially gave away MS-DOS with Windows to try to undermine DR-DOS. There were recorded cases of them developing software specifically to sense a competitor title and induce incompatibilities that weren't necessarily there. Back when Microsoft Office still had significant commercial competition it was noted that it had substantially weaker copy protection than other Microsoft software, suggested to be on the basis that an illegal copy of Office was better for Microsoft than a legal copy of competitor software.
Microsoft were recorded as saying they were giving away Internet Explorer to 'cut off Netscape's air supply'. Netscape were marketing their web server as a superior product running on NT Workstation to IIS on NT Server, so Microsoft bundled IIS with NT Server and changed the terms on NT Workstation to prevent its use as a server.
Microsoft were specifically challenged that their line on IE being inextricably integrated with Windows was incorrect and produced false videos in testimony to back up their case. When they were ordered to produce an edition of Windows without IE they insisted they could then only produce either an obsolete or non-functional edition. Bill Gates' giving of his testimony was described as 'evasive and non-responsive' and many of his denials were directly undermined by his own emails. Bluntly, in trying to defend the case they committed repeated perjury.
From this, findings of fact were issued (which still stand) which stated that Microsoft's standing in the x86 operating system market constituted a monopoly and that they had taken actions to crush threats to this monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others.
Microsoft's behaviour was illegal under US anti-trust law and had abused market positions to the detriment of competitors. Microsoft's business tactics were illegally stifling their new entrepreneurial challengers.
Which is why, still, I consider Bill Gates' money to be tainted. He may well be doing a fantastic, dedicated job of his philanthropy at present. He may well have been somewhat similarly wealthy regardless. But, regardless, he still worked to obtain a dominant position for his company, at the expense of competitor software that could have promoted a more dynamic, diverse ecosystem, by means that were found to be illegal and anti-competitive.
I've heard Bill speak about global health issues in large plenary sessions and in small poster sessions. Speaking as somebody who has spent two decades working in this area...Bill's command of the issues is stunning and far ahead of most of the scientists I work with on a daily basis. He has the kind of knowledge that comes only with a huge investment of /personal time and energy/ spent flying all over the world, speaking with scientists, politicians, educators, and people affected by these various conditions. Frankly, I have the impression that global health is now an 80-hour-a-week job for Bill Gates. He has that kind of knowledge and passion about the issues when he speaks.
Bill's investment of personal time and energy is what really impresses me. If I had $50B or so, I'd probably give most of it away, but I'd probably do that while lying on a beach somewhere. Not Bill. He's working hard to give his money away in the right way, while taking time away from his family to do it.
And that's charity.
He's given away billions and billions of his personal fortune. If he literally stole the money (which he did not), the giving away of it would still be amazing. He's also giving away his substantial creative energy and his time.
When you've got 140 million to invest you don't buy stocks like the little people. You put it in a hedge fund like Blackstone that has returned an average of 20% per year over the last two decades.
PS: Or as my grandfather who made plenty of money in the stock market said, "Don't invest in banks they can look like their doing well and then die at any time."
Rather than focus on whether Steve did great things because of his passion for excellence, or because he wanted to have legions of fans, or for whatever other supposedly saintlike or selfish reason, focus on what he accomplished: bringing computing to the masses. That is an amazing thing.
He ran a successful computer company and led the teams that produced some really nice gadgets.
Get some perspective people !
The masses in the West. You don't see to many Mac's running around Africa, India, China, or Russia.
I'm not trying to belittle Steve Jobs at all. He was a visionary who had a stunning ability to spot and develop good products. It made him, and others VERY wealthy. And powerful.
But don't think for a minute Mr Jobs did it out of the goodness of his heart. Profit and his vision motivated him. He wanted to push the industry he loved in a certain direction. And he succeded brilliantly.
Oh and I admire him for doing what he loved to the bitter end. I can tell you, from personal experience (I lived though AIDS/Cancer) that was not easy for him. At all. I admire him a great deal for never giving in.
//edited. changed the 1st line and added the last paragraph.
I don't behave altruistically in order to feel better about myself. If I want to do that, I'll go out with friends and have a good time or something.
When I behave altruistically, it is driven almost entirely by my ego: I believe that I am capable of making a difference (huge ego & hubris there), and I want to make a difference because it is the only form of immortality that exists so far.
I think the biggest difference between people like me, and Jobs, in this regard is that he actually pulled it off.
Regardless of whether you feel better about yourself or not, intentionally self-sacrificing for the benefit of others is altruism (time, effort, or money are the usual) - there's nothing in the definition saying you must endure some sort of pain or end up less of a person as a result.
Altruism doesn't have anything to do with self-sacrifice. It is about doing an act that benefits others. Saying, as the person I was responding to said, that someone is not altruistic if they do something "just because" that was their passion, and not because it would help others, is myopic.
Then there's the evolutionary biological sense of altruism, or the philosophical variant of "Pure Altruism", requiring that you suffer for a gift to be truly selfless. People who get really bogged down in this kind of nit-picking would do well to go outside and breath deeply. (points at self)
Altruism is doing something where the balance is for the betterment of others, and costs you in some form, such as time (and it is also not atruistic to donate someone else's resources). But that cost does not have to be suffering.
Ultimately, the core of altruism is really whether you're primarily doing -foo- for yourself, or for the benefit of others.
Woz had a near-death plane crash and lost his memory for several weeks prior to the festival stuff. Kind of hard to judge him comparatively like this, maybe he wasn't capable of the type of work he did at Apple prior to the crash anymore.
Not to criticize, though, but the underlying premise that industrial scale "charity" is necessarily good deserves a critical reassessment.
Investment works and turns countries and companies into net producers. That's the story of countless Asian Tigers. At the largest scale, aid did not fix China and India, capitalism did.
This is because charity/aid doesn't scale. It's zero sum, it does not teach the guy on the other side of the transaction to catch a fish, to determine what they can produce which is worthy of trading in the global market.
I understand that Gates, Buffet, and now Zuckerberg had to throw their money away to buy respectability, in the same way people in olden times gave money to the church for various mumbo jumbo rituals. But I often wonder what could have happened had more of those billions been channeled into genuine positive sum activities like Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus' Grameen Bank.[1] Entities not necessarily focused on absolutely maximum profit, but which are at least self sustaining like Craigslist and hence not infinitely dependent on yet more infusions of cash from third parties.
[1] I'm sure that with all the billions spent, at least some has gone into real social entrepreneurship, meaning profitable standalone organizations. But it's hard to escape the fact that Gates, by his own admission, wasted literally billions on education with little to show for it.
The goal instead should be to identify the next Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Salman Khan, or Mohammed Yunus and back them. Have them create a few billion in value and capture enough to remain afloat, and maybe dial up the next few efforts of this kind.
In fact, Bill Gates probably did alot more good to humanity by being one of the most generous philanthropists on the planet.
Note that you're comparing him to Bill Gates, one of the (if not the) most effective philanthropists on the planet. By comparing him to Bill Gates you've effectively conceded the argument.