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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Finally, here's his true color. "Don't do this or I will sue you" is the most unimaginative, terrible, desperate statement one could make to enforce their unfair superiority over others, especially given the fact that this person was known to be a lot more creative and intelligent otherwise.

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Yes and no. Your post makes it seem like this is the first time anyone has heard of Steve Jobs threatening to sue.

Apple sued Microsoft over Windows, then got Microsoft to invest and commit Office to Macintosh for 5 years + $150 million to settle litigation between the two companies.

Jobs threatened to sue former CEO of Sun over a prototype desktop environment[1]

[1] http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...

This is unfortunately a side effect of living in a world where software and software ideas can be patented. It is a shame that Steve Jobs resorted to this kind of bullying to get what he wanted though. Seems very childish but pretty in-step with how he was portrayed in his biography.

    Apple sued Microsoft over Windows, then got
    Microsoft to invest and commit Office to Macintosh
    for 5 years + $150 million to settle litigation
    between the two companies.

It was more than that. Apple was seen as the only 'credible' competition to Microsoft in the OS space. If Apple went under, Microsoft was absolutely going to get smacked with an antitrust lawsuit by the government. As it works out, they did anyway, but I think that a $150mm deal on non-voting shares (which were later resold at a profit) was seen as a no-brainer sort of move.

The other side of the coin are comments like this. "Finally, a new narrative!" This is just as lame as those that canonize him outside of his direct accomplishments. Steve Jobs had two MAJOR successes (Pixar and Apple). He was highly competitive and did aggressively oppressive things and had moments of integrity. I just wish everyone would stop trying to color his biography like they had to write a movie synopsis of his life in a a sentence.

Id argue that is the real lesson here. Be OK with being inconsistent relative to circumstance, if you believe that all great men held firm to their "codes" then you will fail in your emulation of greatness.

TL;DR Life's messy, people can't be summed up in a characteristic , Steve Jobs was a dick and a hero.

The problem I have with this analysis is that there's an implied justification for being a dick as long as you're successful in the end. Too many people have taken this as the lesson of Steve Jobs.

Who's trying to justify their dickishness with the example of Steve Jobs?

I meet people all the time that think that stepping into his shoes is just a matter of being a total douche to everybody.

I've worked for people who have cited him as an excuse for bad decisions and obnoxious handling of other people.

Fake Steve Jobs's are a plague. They assume that they've already got the vision and creativity (often they don't, but every narcissist thinks that of himself) so the only thing they need to do in order to have that level of success (and admiration) is copy the bad parts of his personality... which is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

What they don't seem to realize is that Steve Jobs emerged in one time and environment that no longer exist. The opportunities that were available to a 20-year-old in 1975 in Northern California don't exist anymore. They're somewhere, but real opportunities are never visible (as such) at the time, so there's a huge amount of luck involved.

I have a hard time finding anything heroic in this.

He was a great artist, sure.

He was a great businessman, sure.

He also had crappy morals and did not mind stepping on people to achieve his goals. That including claiming "ownership" to ideas and concept created eons ago, and being abusive on the market. Sure, peoples lives are messy, but it doesn't justify bad behavior. And, bad behavior, bad morals, should not be lifted up as attributes of an hero.

It doesn't get any more basic than this. People think there is some secret to running a business, like great leadership or being smart or visionary. The sick reality is that people simply gain power and use it against their opponents, like machines. All those business books like 7 habits, how to win friends, etc need to be thrown away. Here we have what many, many people considered the most successful business man of recent history, simply threatening people like a dumb animal. The whole world is overthinking business.

Saying something like this is akin to saying that the whole world is overthinking biking and all those tips on endurance training are irrelevant because Lance Armstrong was using drugs.

All those books tips are still useful if you want to become a better businessman.

>People think there is some secret to running a business...the most successful business man of recent history, simply threatening people like a dumb animal.

Except that having business skill is a necessary condition to getting to a position where you can leverage your power.

This isn't about any single individual, though he certainly did not contribute positively to the situation.

Schmidt's response was no better. Are we to imagine he would not have sent the same sternly worded memo to Jobs had the roles been reversed?

IIRC this report fits in with earlier stories which reported that Jobs was active in pushing for no-hire agreements to be set up in the first place. That does make him look worse than Schmidt, who afaik hasn't (yet?) been revealed as an initiator. Though neither man looks like an oil painting now.

See here for more. All of Silicon Valley was in on this. http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-...

Those were surprisingly shocking to see. I never imagined high-level CEOs would actually put things like this on paper.

Just a reminder to yourself that everything you do as a CEO has to be able to survive public scrutiny...

I never imagined high-level CEOs would actually put things like this on paper.

Seriously, isn't that one of the first rules of illegal activity? And many of them went to school for white-collar crime; the rest of us had to learn that stuff on our own!

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