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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did.

That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term.

A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.

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Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1]

Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.

[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.

[2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.

I'd love to read that memoir. I feel like the NeXT era is really interesting but somewhat less covered than other periods.

I feel like you have to expand the taxonomy of people expressed in milli-jobs. Does anyone out there exceed 1000 mJobs? Does anyone come the closest? Is there a suitable conversion to other systems of measurement?

I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds.

He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle.

I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.

Steve Jobs famously did not make friends with his engineers. I do not know where you get this info. Or rather... he was the type of friend who probably made you prefer your enemies. a. He dicked Woz on the Breakout design, telling him he would split the proceeds 50/50 - turns out it was more 25/75. b. He dicked Dan Kottke (very early Apple employee and friend from Reid College with whom he backpacked in India) by cancelling his stock options when apple IPOed - Woz stepped in and gave Dan some of his share allocation. c. The last time I saw Burell Smith, he was homeless living on the streets in Palo Alto - very friendly of Steve to not do anything for him. d. Steve dicked Jef Raskin (who kicked off the original Macintosh project, thought Jef's idea was WAAAAY different than the Mac that eventually emerged)

What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."

It sounds strange that someone could go from lofty Apple engineer to homeless (though it certainly wouldn’t be the first fall from grace in human history).

I read the brief wikipedia page about Smith, which states he has bipolar disorder and has at least one incident that was publicized in the early 90s. Was your encounter with him before or after that?

Sadly, with some people it doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much help you give them behind the scenes. I’m not saying Jobs went to the end of the earth for him, I don’t know. But I know people from my own life where it didn’t matter, so it’s in the realm of imagination at least.

The stock bs sounds dickish though.

I knew Burrell back in the early 80s, but we didn't keep in touch. Next time I saw him was in the late 90s.

Yes, I agree.

So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?

That would be awesome

Maybe!

Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.

Well, I'm not upgrading to Tahoe though, so I'm not buying anything new they come out with...

Woz comes to the West Coast VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) from time to time. For geeks of a certain age, he's a very engaging speaker and it's clear he loved the tech as much as the other older engineers who typically come to such events.

The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.

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