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Comment by trevor99 | Hacker News Reader

Article is just trying to expel the misconceptions around Jobs and say that brilliant engineering is more important than design & reality distortion field in a startup.

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You can't separate Jobs' and Wozniak's contributions like that. Jobs deserves great credit for helping to motivate Wozniak's great feats in the early days (look how much effort it took to convince Woz to leave HP, even after Apple's initial successes), handling practical considerations and component issues, and forming the early Apple leadership team which eventually lead to Markulla's involvement. PG has spoken many times about how "scrapiness" is perhaps the most crucial sign of a successful startup; almost all of Apple's came from Jobs.

This is an incredibly divisive mentality. The word "balance" gets thrown around a lot, but it's commonplace for a reason. Both engineering and "design & reality distortion" are valuable for a start up. You have to balance the two.

You're always going to have power struggles in startups. That's the nature of the beast when you put highly motivated, competitive individuals in a room, but the smartest of the players know that with the help of everyone around them, their chances of success increase many times over.

This theory is not supported by reality. Companies succeed just as often with lousy engineering.

Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the visionary entrepreneur. They both needed each other.

He was not a visionary entrepreneur, that's the whole point. His vision led him to create product flops for 20 years. Markkula on the other hand got it correct with the Apple II from having the right industry knowledge.

Let's see. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Barack Obama, Bob Iger, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Dell, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Spielberg, Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Wolfram, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dick Costolo, Steve Case, Marc Andressen, etc. They all think he's a visionary. Should I believe them or you?

You should believe neither them nor trevor99. Look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.

Thanks for answering my rhetorical question.

Can you elaborate on what his flops were?

LISA? kicked off the team

Macintosh? I'm typing from one right now

NEXTStep? considering the technology forms the foundation for OSX and iOS doesn't look like it flopped.

AppleTV? it's doing better than it's competition, maybe.

Apple Hifi? definitely.

Pixar? I think other animation studios wish they could as good as their worst films.

Over the course of his career most of his "flops" have turned out successful. He pumped millions of dollars over a decade to keep Pixar afloat. And it was him and his technical team at NEXT that turned the Mac into what it is today.

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