He was a visionary and "got" tech -- Apple's success with him (both times) and the floundering in between demonstrate his value to their story.
Again, not a nice man and not worthy of worship but definitely of respect for what he delivered.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
This is an odd thing to say when Steve Jobs achieved most of his success after parting ways with Woz. Jobs was the product guy at Apple. He laser focused on every detail to make sure that the experience was perfect.
Jobs wasn't an engineer, but there were plenty of talented engineers at Microsoft working for years on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone) because it was so unintuitive. By contrast, the original iPhone was a decade ahead of it's time in terms of design. It had pinch-to-zoom, a proximity sensor to prevent accidental touches during calls, a light sensor that adjusted brightness, and an accelerometer for landscape and portrait mode. These features were originally considered gimmicks, but it turned out to be indispensable.
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Conversely, Woz started numerous companies after parting ways with Jobs, and I can't think of a single one that had a lasting impact.
"After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month."
"Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees."
Well, if your standard is that no one is a bad person until they are literally murdering people or selling war machines, then no, of course not.
But as a parent myself, I think it's fair to say that if you, as a multimillionaire, stoop to doing the bare legal minimum to support the child you created, who was at one point living in poverty because you failed to support her before, then yes: you are a bad person.
There are obviously many other ways in which Steve Jobs was a bad person! He kept obtaining temporary license plates because he wanted to park in handicapped spots without getting tickets. He orchestrated a salary-fixing cartel that artificially depressed wages for many thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley, all so that he and his other obscenely rich friends could get even richer. And he had his devices manufactured in China under horrendously exploitative conditions again, so that he and his shareholders could make an extra buck. (on top of the billions they already had)
But if your standard of being a "bad person" (not even evil!) is murder or complicity in it, then you could make a strong case that Steve Jobs was not a bad person, altogether.
Speaking only for myself, when I call someone a "bad" person (I am wary of calling anyone "bad," but that is the language used in this conversation), I mean that they treat others poorly. They may contribute immensely to the world (as Steve Jobs did), but that is orthogonal to whether they are a good or bad person.
I know others have a different calculus, and I am not trying to convince anyone. Still, being a bad parent, especially after you have asked to reconcile, is... well... a person I would be hesitant to associate with regardless of how much I loved my iPhone 2G, or how cool the Lisa looked in the early 1980s.
It absolutely is, in my opinion
Umm . . . yes?
Being a bad parent can damage a child for life. That's pretty bad in my book. I've seen it so much.
But in my view it's not black and white. He was certainly a bad parent. Also a pretty bad employer when I read the stories of how he treated people. But he was a good marketeer and a role model to many people. Definitely investors will think he was a good person lol
I think it's up to each of us to judge a person by the criteria we find important. Personally I don't think being a successful businessman is a virtue or admirable but creating beautiful things is. He did do some of that and I do admire that (that he sold millions of them and created value for shareholders is something I couldn't care less about though)
But being a kind and caring person is the most important criterium to me. For that reason I have to say that no, in my book he doesn't qualify as a good person. I'm sure that for many others he does and that's ok too. Everyone has their own metrics.
Of course ... and that's not nearly his only negative that has been expressed here.
What is really tragic is that so many people are talking about Jobs at all under this post about Wozniak and his goodhearted ethic.
Emphatic yes. There are only a few such tests that would get an emphatic yes.
That he could have been genocidal but wasn't does not make him less qualified to be a bad person.
I don't understand this part, in America, you cannot enter the college for free even with good grades?
the guy who never acknowledged his kid until a court forced him to pay child support?
He outright lied to Wozniak over payments and shares.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-gave-early-app...
He put himself on the organ waiting list in multiple states when it became apparent that his quack medicine wasn't working to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer. He took a liver from someone out of state and died with it. They changed the law to prevent this happening again.
Sure, complain about him forcing his way onto lists if we're willing to accept that all humans are truly equal (I'm fine with this concept), or being mean to others, but who CARES about the other stuff?
People like Jobs get attention because they're obnoxious. If they never existed, the world would be no worse off.
It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
edit: it's almost like, in the current social meta of "doing no wrong is more important than doing good", there is a need to denigrate any approach that doesn't feel extra cozy and warm and loving. But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history. He had a helluva team and made things work. I gotta be honest, I don't really care if he said scary and mean things.
I never understood this kind of thinking, and have always found it particularly heartless & puzzling, until one day I stumbled upon something I myself had no visceral reaction to but other people clearly did. It looked like they were being fake about it, either completely, or just in an exaggerating way.
Turned out no, I was just not in the headspace required. Which makes sense cause I mean, let's be honest: what do you think is more likely? The majority of people secretly and intentionally all just messing with you, or rather them just actually saying what they think, and then you just not being able to relate to it?
I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick when something like 50% of CEOs already show psychopathic traits.
Then how am I supposed to interpret "people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole"? You literally say people are pretending.
> when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces
I would 100% say he was "some kind of monster" for power abuse (verbal harassment), as well as for denying and neglecting his child, yes. The scrambling for an organ donor after his drug-addled delusions fell through thing doesn't sound too hot either.
Judgements are subjective. Usually people operate under shared assumptions, so one would just expect that their judgement would be widely shared - but this doesn't make them some universal truth.
This is how and why you end up in a circle when people describe things he's a bad person for, and then you just say "well I don't find those things to be bad". Great, we already know he's not a bad person for you, you said as much. People just disagree and see it different, and list things off for you to try and relate. And so you list off counterpoints to make them try and relate.
> I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick
Yes, well, being extremely "well known", along with his personality, despite never having met 99.999% of the people who "know" about him is pretty unrealistic / unnatural to begin with. This includes me of course.
And I’m not surprised that you think he’s some kinda monster. That’s the insane world we live in today, and why it’s such an obnoxious one. You’ve got nothing to balance any bad act on, besides “everything must be done with perfect kindness”, so even something as minor as being rude comes across as “some kind of monster”. You’ve artificially moved your Overton window to such a falsely soft world, you can no longer reasonably judge regular people.
Tried my best to be persuasive, but this is all I had in me. Let's see where our opinions take this world.
I'm not perfect but he was everything I strive not to be (I'm not always successful though). I strive to be kind, fair, generous, caring and inclusive. I'm not always those things but I do try. From what I 've seen about Jobs is that he didn't really share those values.
I understand that other people admire him a lot but I don't really, because I have other criteria.
And really to be honest I would not like 95% of successful corporate CEOs. It's not just Jobs. You have to be a certain type, an ambitious person with shark tactics who puts everything aside to get to the top. Otherwise someone else who is will beat you to it. Those are not qualities I consider good in a person.
However each person makes their own judgment and that's ok. My opinion doesn't really matter, but it is mine.
He would, if he were still alive. But he’s not. Most likely due to his own irrationality.
> But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history.
Do you really believe that life would have been particularly different if he had never existed? I don’t. I suppose if you’re some sort of Apple fanboy, you might feel that way, but from any broader perspective, I don’t see it.
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
Answer: because he was the only one brave enough to be this transparent. Literally all you're doing is encouraging everyone to hide this behavior as much as possible, and never EVER own up to it.
Personally, I don't give much credit for "bravery" when it's expressed in terms of "being transparent" about being an asshole.
“Everyone, I’m bravely showing you my spotless record” is really not an impressive showing. Being willing to completely upend your own reputation is.
I give more bravery points (which are worthless of course) to a whistle blower or someone running into a burning building to rescue the world's most tragic orphan.
i want courts to make it right, not for the swindlers to be confident talking about how they swindle people without consequence.
"owning up to it" is making it right, not chit chatting
Comment on him positively, you're now contributing to elevating his identity into something beyond human (etc.).
Comment on him negatively, and now you're just using him as a scapegoat (etc.).
It would seem like the real devil is in the asymmetry of significance, not in the people in question, or even the traits.
this was done so he could park in disabled spaces
which is pretty scummy
I’m sure Jobs could have had all the legal handicap plates he’d have wanted, if the point was just parking in the handicap spot. But it wasn’t.
That makes no sense to me. I can't think of a place Jobs would ever drive his car where it would matter if he could park at a disabled spot. He had his own spot at both Apple and his home, where else did he ever park often enough for that to matter?
Personally I believe the explanation that he did it to avoid the ugly license plate. It mirrors how he refused any stickers on the Mac, when all other PC makers had to put the "intel inside" on theirs.
I found an article that this successful use of a donor organ, rather than waste it, was celebrated, and motivated a pro donor law in California.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-does-it-after-alm...
>to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer has a 13% survival rate
>refused to register his automobile?
Who cares.
The sheer amount of conspiratorial, loaded questions on HN these days is absolutely staggering.
No, you don't have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
There's a good argument that FLW was a supercharged version of Jobs - wildly charismatic, visionary, uncompromisingly obsessive about the most minute of details, and could be manipulative and cruel. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1909 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress. This was a national scandal at the time.
In his houses, he did all decorations (including providing art from his large personal stash) and built all the furniture and would go on tirades against his clients if he found out if they moved or replaced anything after they moved in, usually cutting off all further ties if they did not give into his demands. Also a fun fact is FLW had an obsession w/ Japanese woodblocking, similar in a way to Job's thing w/ calligraphy.
On top of that, their life took a similar arc where each had incredible success early in life that eventually crumbled under their own ambition, spent a time out in the wilderness, then went through a resurgence toward the end that greatly eclipsed their early success. Regardless, throughout his lifetime he maintained he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
FLW actually wrote an autobiography during his time in the 'wilderness' (basically running an architecture cult in the desert) in the early 30s, and much of it is fanciful bluster, a bunch of half truths and exaggerations, almost as a means to save his legacy. You read it and kinda feel sorry for the guy. Yet, five years later as he turned 70, he created Fallingwater which led to so much work, that the last 20 years of his life he produced over twice as many commissions than he had done to that point. In fact when he died he was in the middle of actively working on 60 projects, most notably overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
There's plenty of WTF things you'll find upon digging in, such as his partner and her children (and other friends) being axed to death by a servant at one of his early compounds, and his time in Japan building the Imperial Hotel to be earthquake resistant - only for it to be hit by a 7.9 on its opening day, and being one of the few structures to survive mostly intact in all of Tokyo.
And with Fallingwater, after lying to his client that the design was complete, the client basically said, “great, I’m coming over.” Wright hadn’t produced anything - it was all in his head. According to his assistants, he worked feverishly over the next couple hours, putting the design to paper with virtually no mistakes - floor plans, elevations, scale drawings, site modifications - so that by the time the client arrived, it looked fully realized. A project of that scope would normally take months of work and dozens of revisions, but Wright had spent the better part of a year building it entirely in his mind, mostly on site visits just staring at the waterfall for hours at a time.
Others may say it, but there's a difference between being annoyed that other people say something, and turning your comment in such a way that others saying it looks like you're being prevented from saying what you want.
Nobody is perfect but this doesn't excuse everything.
> We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments
Nobody prevents you from acknowledging anything.
Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
I haven't seen these things said, but apart from HN I don't do social media. I'll believe you that these claims are stated. They are of course shallow.
I bet it depends on how you present stuff. How you "sound". Or when you choose to present facts.
Here, for instance, it looked like you dismissed the criticisms towards those guys. You stated that these guys have their flaws like everybody. You diminish their issues and that's exactly what will make people strongly disagree with you. In many people's heads, those guys are huge assholes, really not comparable to your random person. You'll need to have this in mind when discussing this stuff. If you do it like this, people might not listen because you may sound like a guy who is a fan of two huge assholes at the same time to many of us (even if it's false).
Even if what you state is true, if it sounds like you take the defense of these billionaires whenever they are criticized for other things, I can certainly believe you will be shut down. They have / had a lot of power, it can seem way off to defend them, they really don't need your help.
There are good and bad timings, and effective ways to state facts and others, not.
You'll need to read the room. Of course.
And toxic places also can't be saved. Just flee.