I think I’ve always attributed Steve’s huge success to 3 things; Meeting Woz, Meeting Markkula and spending a lot of time to practise articulating himself.
I must admit, I envy the man. Who doesn’t. Apple is a fantastic company and keeps releasing great products.
But it was Woz who was the true hardware/software talent; he spent his childhood designing processors that he didn't have the money to build. He was fascinated with circuits & electronics & processors.
Steve worked at Atari but got Woz in to do the circuit for breakout, Steve had no idea how it worked and couldn't have done it himself. When Atari paid for the work he shafted Woz by giving him a _much_ smaller amount than half of what he received.
Steve's skills mostly seem to have settled in the management/figurehead role. People say that he had excellent vision for design but realistically I think he had skills in none of the areas that he hired people to do and that his major skill was as company head, tying everything and everyone together into a cohesive unit.
He was very demanding and threw tantrums, but that's still human; however episodes like when Woz left Apple to go and invent the universal remote, he sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wall in a rage. Dude had power trip/anger issues to the max.
We can't forget that Microsoft/Bill Gates bailed Apple out at one point, too. I'd say this is likely a failing of their market at the time; Apple's market of doe eyed "it just works" fans didn't exist/wasn't large enough at that point in time. Nowadays, they don't have anything to worry about.
I, Woz; Steve Wozniak's autobiography is a great read for a bit more info into Jobs. He tells it like it was, though maybe slightly muted due to the fact that the two were still friends. The official Jobs bio is just revisionist prose.
If you've ever worked in a large company you know how rare that is and how critical that is.
I mean, of course, it's a good thing to know when to say no, if used parsimoniously.
The problem is that we now have zillions of wannabee Steve Jobs who believe saying no to everything automatically makes them brilliant visionaries.
Which is a just very roundabout way of saying success comes from consistently making good choices...
I've been on a ton of teams where everyone agreed we were not going to do a feature. Only to have that person go back to working on that feature because it was important to them and the work they were supposed to be doing, which the team depended on, didn't get done.
In my experience, this is a serious issue in large corporations and it happens at the individual, group and even division level. Apple, under Steve Jobs, didn't seem to have this problem and they seemed to get a ton done, with comparatively quite small teams, because of it.
At the time of the MS deal, Apple had 4 Billion in the bank because of a loan that Amelia had already secured.
Microsoft invested $250 Million in Apple and a month later, Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. It also took 4 years before Apple was profitable after the deal
The other myth is that Microsoft “agreed to port Office to the Mac” in 1997. By 1997, Word and Excel had been on the Mac since the mid 80s. MS agreed to keep supporting Office on the Mac.
Also MS was much more concerned about snuffing out Netscape than Apple. Apple agreed to make IE the default browser on Macs.
Besides, at the time, MS made more on each Mac sold than Apple because of Office.
Well yeah, of course, he was a vegan. He lived in a state of perpetual malnourishment that left him unable to maintain a calm and rational state.
That's almost certainly why, on finding out he had the only curable form of pancreatic cancer, he decided that the answer was to stick coffee up his bum.
Steve Jobs gotta say does an amazing job of looking bad at tech while knowing everything, just everything. Like yes he couldn't do Breakout but he actually tried, trial and error for a while. Master at steps 1 and 3, ignorant but not completely and could have gotten a bad Breakout for his step 2 for he himself to pull it off. So that's why he teamed up.
So, empirically it seems like there’s something Jobs brought to these relationships, something pretty important. But it’s hard to describe. Perhaps that is one reason people are still talking about him a decade later.
If we're talking about the technical and design merits of Apple devices anyways. Not the status symbol aspects.
What I am suggesting is the personality types live on and continue to work together at Apple.
How many are influenced by Jobs - the Mac, the iPad, the iPhone, the App Store?
When Woz left, Apple wasn’t a major player in the tech space in the grand scheme of things. Apple became the most valuable company in the US right before Jobs passed.
My first computer was an Woz inspired Apple //e. My current computer is a Jobs inspired Mac that Woz had nothing to do with.
Breakout didn't have a microprocessor so Woz didn't program that either.
- Jobs brought Woz over to the office at night
- completed with much less electronics parts
- Jobs struggled to explain the internal workings (of a schema he didn't make)
- Woz was compensated less (by being told by Jobs that Atari didn't give a big bonus)
- Jobs denies siphoning much of the bonus
No judgement, its impossibly difficult but it just seems like an incredibly painful existence and it feels like that relationship might be the biggest opportunity to have a direct influence on the future most (some) of us get.
But according to that punk'd biopic it seems like he got things on track near the end so hopefully it was all good.
> Sent from my iPad
Why not tolerate a diversity of opinions on priorities? I'm personally better off for Jobs having a different preference matrix. My kids will be as well.
Great. And yes, I'd resent him had he traded the weekends we spent making balsa-wood gliders, filming Star Trek home videos (paper maché + sugar against a black t-shirt + handycam) and taking desert hikes for face time in the office.
But we are inarguably better off for Jobs--and countless others--having prioritised their professions over conventional needs. It simply seems a bit ruddy to footnote that sacrifice with scoffing.
You don’t know the alternate reality where jobs did not do that. Perhaps another company would have done similar things or even something completely different than also improved our lives.
EDIT: That's how a woman I know got her husband to stop beating her, was ready with the knives, said some Shrinktalk quotes (the book may come soon), and the guy...didn't...didn't...have that much of a beating for her in him any longer.
Palm was mismanaged its entire life and kept spinning off and re-acquiring the same assets.
Source: I lived through that era writing software for micro computers.
The point I made was that IBM were slow to release a home machine. And even when they eventually did release their first PC, it was still viewed more as a business machine. meanwhile Apple and Microsoft (amongst others) were already established in the home computer market.
It took years for the PC to become dominant. Frankly their dominance isn’t even because of IBM but instead because every other manufacturer ripped off IBMs design. Some of us old timers still call those macHines “IBM-compatible” since the term “personal computer” wasn’t always specifically referring to an x86+BIOS, like it later came to be in the 90s.
I do miss the 70s and 80s era of computing. Everything felt new and magical. It was like your imagination was the only limit. A bit like web development in the 90s and AI these days. As nice as it when an industry matures, there is a lot of fun to be had in the early days when everyone is doing silly things because there’s nobody to tell us otherwise.
Help build, perhaps. But never command, ship or sell. It's one thing to recognize a skill in someone you do not have. It's another to fail to ever see it.
I think it’s fair to say the iPhone/iPod and by extension iPad never ships without Steve Jobs.