Hacker News Reader

Comment by Venn1 | Hacker News Reader

Tech leaders from this era will not be remembered well.

There's not much good to remember them by for the past decade they have been implementing a global panopticon system etc.

At least in the 1990s and 2000s it felt they were doing some good stuff for humanity. But the 2010s and 2020s the masked pretty much slipped.

They knew all along how their companies could profit from surveillance and propaganda.

I think you underestimate what the human attention span has become.

I wonder which spectrum Steve Jobs would be on if he was still alive to this day.

Hate him or not, Steve Jobs understood humans. He spoke and behaved as a human. He was flawed and may be considered "cringey" now, but I think he'd be liked better than the rest.

His Apple keynotes conveyed a sense of magic, for example demonstrating pinch to zoom on the iPhone and pulling a MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. And something he'd be angry because things didn't go as planned.

These pre-recorded keynotes we get nowadays are just bland and AI-generated.

"You're holding it wrong" would beg to differ, not to mention the many flops he had (remember the magic mouse?).

He was smart & very successful. I wouldn't call him relatable to most humans.

Steve Jobs? The guy who was adopted by working class parents, a hippy, with a Syrian immigrant father? I think he might view the world slightly differently than the guys born into wealth, who went to Ivy League schools, and who all seemingly share the same total inability to understand ordinary human beings.

As opposed to the current guy who gifted a custom 24K gold plaque to the current administration, after being raised by a shipyard worker and pharmacist and attending a public land-grant research university in Alabama.

When it comes to business, I think Jobs would grovel at the feet of Trump just as much as Cook has.

Yeah Steve Jobs was deeply frustrated with Obama when he got to meet him. Jobs hated unions, and felt like the Obama administration was not business friendly enough. He also felt the Obama administration was too reluctant to offend people.

He didn't live long enough to become the bad guy, but if he were alive today, I think there's a near-zero percent chance he'd support Clinton or Biden over Trump in either of those elections.

There's two opposing forces at work. Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs, and no one wants to be Steve Ballmer. So the only choice is to go to the extreme to stay as far away from the other end as possible.

I'd take Steve Ballmer over most of the current big-tech CEOs, to be honest.

That is a bold prediction

No it is not.

It doesn't seem like a stretch. I don't know what you mean.

(You may disagree with the opinion of course, but "bold" is a counterintuitive adjective here)

How so?

Big difference between owners like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk vs. Sundar Pichai.

I mean, sure there is a difference but for all intents their beliefs and actions seem to be aligned.

In net worth maybe, but in what other ways are you claiming there are large differences?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com