Wozniak Says `Lot of Things Wrong’ With Jobs Movie [video]
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
She seems to let Wozniak get about 80-90% into statements and then speedily talk over him to move onto the next point. It doesn't sound like she's actually listening to his answers, just going down her checklist. At one point he explains why he liked Sorkin's approach better than Kutcher's, then she asked a later question as if he had never said that.
It's kind of sad. Woz mentioned numerous times that the problem was showing the pre-firing Jobs behaving and being treated more like he was after having matured, but the interviewer just didn't get it.
She also asked quite a few questions designed in a "X vs. Y, choose now!" style, trying to get a soundbite or setup a narrative (Woz wisely wouldn't fall for it). Between that and the interrupting, it was actually kind of hard to listen to.
Missed opportunities, I guess.
How do you come to the conclusion that she doesn't get his point? Didn't she even react to that with the "is he too visionary in the movie" question line?
> How do you come to the conclusion that she doesn't get his point?
Maybe she did. But it didn't seem to influence the questions she asked. I felt like they could have taped both sides of the interview separately and then just spliced it together. There were almost no follow-up questions, it sounded like she could have ended every part with "Thank you, next question." She asked him some base question and he explained the difference between Sorkin's and Kutcher's approaches. Ten minutes later she asked that very question, without even acknowledging that she already had the answer. Instead of "You touched on the difference in Sorkin's style, could you tell us more..." it was "I hear your working with Sorkin. How did that compare." It gave the impression she wasn't really paying attention to her own interview.
My impression was the whole thing was set out before it started. She had her angle, and she just kept trying to get there. To get him to trash someone, to say the movie was a travesty, to bait him with "is Apple doomed?" again, or to just finish it up and get onto the next segment. No engagement, no feeling, no heart... just hollowness and a missed opportunity.
There are certainly points where he was running on a bit, but it wasn't a good conversation. Very clash of personalities rather than giving someone a topic to talk about and moving on when they've said what they have to say.
Part of that's probably that she just seemed to have a list of fairly specific questions she wanted to run through - which is a terrible way to talk to anyone, especially if you've not done your research into how they like to talk and what they're going to want to talk about properly.
This is a property of American media. When people start talking over each other, I stop watching. I can't take it.
Conversations and interviews are like a game. Each person makes their turn; the next person only gets to go when the current player finishes their turn.
The British media is a little better at this, and I'm talking mainly about BBC News, but it's still not perfect. In fact, you can see the mockery of this in The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert frequently talks over his interviewees; it's part of his character and it hits the nail right on the head.
She did better than I would have. I'd probably be interviewing for 30 minutes, end up with almost no good TV points, and have something that would need to be edited down to 3 minutes.
> She did better than I would have. I'd probably be interviewing for 30 minutes, end up with almost no good TV points, and have something that would need to be edited down to 3 minutes.
Maybe that's the problem. Maybe Woz just isn't someone who can really be interviewed well in a short segment on live TV. If they had taped it they could have edited down his answers or organized it better. Maybe she just had a really difficult job to do on this one.
Bub wow are you right. She is really pushing a possible story with each question. It's interesting she seem to be getting facts wrong. She isn't stepping over PG though, so that's obvious just trying to keep Woz on topic.
The guy who joins in (wasn't watching at the moment, so I missed his name), he sounds like he's genuinely interested in what PG is saying. He's not as polished, but he's doing a better job.
Edit: Just finished watching it. The other gentleman is Cory Johnson, and he's a very good interviewer. He continued to outside Emily Chang throughout the video, asking insightful questions in response to what PG said.
I've read a few different articles where they claimed that when he worked at Atari, they created a shift just for him because no one could stand to work around him. Supposedly it was because he was an unwashed hippie, but I'm inclined to think that Atari's entire staff was made up of unwashed hippies during this time period, so it must have been his personality.
In this case, Woz is saying that the movie portrays Jobs as being a lot more focused, capable, and charismatic than he actually was as a young man. Letting the present color our view of the past is an easy story-telling trap to fall into.
If she was indeed like you said she was, she'd push on through the "no comment" on the question about the movie Woz's making, or the question "Should we see the movie?", or...
She also talks down at him and acts like she is more important than him.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/mac-os-x/22659/jobs-ashton-ku...
> "Woz is being paid by another company to support a different Steve Jobs film. It's personal for him, but it's also business. We have to keep that in mind."
Seriously? Woz is the guy who gave his Apple stock shares to co-workers he felt were slighted in the IPO. Hello, he's the guy who wanted to give his groundbreaking engineering behind the Apple away for free.
Woz is an engineering legend...but if there were a Hall of Fame for generosity and integrity, he'd be in there too. Shame on the "Jobs" people and it's great to see the lukewarm/negative reviews roll in for their shit sandwich of a biopic.
Of course, when I actually became an adult, I realized the error of my ways, switched to Linux,and over time my admiration only grew for Woz.
I once appeared in a reenactment of a Jobs/Woz story on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEuJMPBZJ7c . It was a cheesey TV reenactment, and it really doesn't matter which one of the two Steve's I was playing, versus which one was portrayed by my child-hood friend, Travis. But during the filming, I did get to handle a Woz Blue Box, and an Apple I board. It was like touching a Rembrandt, or a Van Gogh.
At the time, I pretended to be Jobs. These days, I say I played Woz.
Woz, to put it bluntly, is the awesomest hacker/engineer, ever. He's just a freakin' god! Everything he's ever done has been 10% pure hacker ethos. The early Apple I's came with a complete explanation of how they were laid out, hardware-wise. The manual was a work of pure joy. You don't get technical writing like that, ever. Nothing was hidden. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Apple/Appl...
If you like that, ever head of the CL 9? Woz, after leaving Apple due to surviving a freakin' plane crash, decided he wanted to fix the then common remote control. The CL9 Core remote control was a hacker's dream device. You could program it to emit whatever IR signals you wanted, and it came with a manual explaining as much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9
Jobs, on the other hand, was a seriously driven guy. An entrepreneur's entrepreneur. Take that for what you will, the good and the bad. I've always taken it to mean he was good at spotting an opportunity and exploiting it.
I, for one, will always worship the engineer, first.
Publishing details at pretty much that level was the norm at the time, nothing particularly special for Apple. E.g. up until at least '87 or '88 (and quite possibly later), pretty much all Commodore hardware had proper schematics in their manuals, and they provided separate documentation with much more detail.
This may not be a good movie and I believe that Woz believes what he says, but like any eyewitness I also believe his memory is colored heavily by his own POV.
Keep your mind clear and don't worship Jobs or Woz.
It's better to have one person who is Level 100 at skill A and another who is Level 100 at skill B, than 75/25 and 25/75.
"Well-rounded" is another term for "mediocre."
If a person learned to become exceptionally 'talented' in one area, then he/she's more likely to replicate that same level success in a completely new area, than someone who hasn't gained that level of skill anywhere. This is because skill acquisition itself is a skill. So once you've learned what it takes to master a certain skill (i.e. you learned how to learn effectively), you can then apply it with much more ease than someone who hasn't really learned how to learn as much. This causes a sort of 'snowball-effect' outcome, where ease of skill acquisition follows a logarithmic curve of sorts rather than a linear/exponential one like most people seem to view it.
The only limiting factor on skill acquisition is choice/taste. If a particular area doesn't interest you, then why bother expending energy learning to master it, right? Doesn't mean you're not capable of it, all it means is that you didn't have to strive for greatness in that area to make it work for you. And since Jobs met Woz pretty early on, there was really no reason for him to become a master engineer thereafter. Meanwhile, Woz probably just didn't care about business/marketing, so he chose to not master it.
There are other factors that influence skill acquisition (e.g. IQ), but they don't necessarily limit it. And in order for the 'fair' view of skill acquisition to hold, there would need to be some sort of non-trainable limiting mechanism for building skills. But as of now, I'm not familiar of anything that would cause that.
The only way the "Jack of all trades; master of none" mantra holds, is if the 'Jack' never deeply learnt/'mastered' any of the subjects he's familiar with. But of course, the label "Jack of all trades" doesn't actually specify whether-or-not that's actually the case. Same for "well-rounded"; implying it indicates anything other than breadth of knowledge is inaccurate.
However, since it is useful, here are some resources to begin learning about what intelligence and cognitive research have to say about the matter:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Talent-Code-Greatness-Grown/dp/055...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Genius-All-Us-Insights/dp/03073873...
http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/26/motivation-not-iq-matt...
http://www.cogmed.com/impact-working-memory-training-young-p...
http://www.cogmed.com/working-memory-but-not-iq-predicts-sub...
http://www.cogmed.com/working-memory-training-generalize-imp...
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~antonvillado/courses/09a_psyc630...
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/ml2009/CMU-ML-09-...
http://jabba.edb.utexas.edu/it/enhancingCognitiveSkill.pdf
There are plenty more resources out there, and I'm sure there are much better ones too. But the implication of all this is that learning is a skill, and that you can learn how to learn better. We may not yet thoroughly understand how generalized learning takes place in the brain, but it does seem to be a function of working memory and motivation, which can be improved. Generalized learning is segmented more finely than how I described it originally, but it still functions the same way (e.g. learning to juggle may not help you learn a new language better, but learning to play a musical instrument may help you to learn the other two more easily, since it incorporates language skills through music, and motor skills through playing). Making an argument against this model would place the burden of proof on that side, because as I mentioned before, there is no known mechanism that would lead to the outcome outlined by the 'fair'/balanced model, and it would have to explain away phenomena like neuroplasticity that seem to directly oppose it.
If a person learned to become exceptionally 'talented' in one area, then he/she's more likely to replicate that same level success in a completely new area
The only limiting factor on skill acquisition is choice/taste.
Doesn't genetics also have some role here? The references you just included do nothing to provide any sort of evidence for those statements. To what extents cognitive skills are transferable is still much debated and science is far from having an unanimous answer. Good overview of the issue is here:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jlnietfe/EDP504_Notes_files/Are%20Cogn...
Now, it is certainly much harder for some people to acquire certain skills, and it may be near impossible to excel at them up to a certain level (e.g. physical athleticism). But skill level is again different from the skill itself, and it is the skills themselves that matter in skill acquisition. For example, if running ability is found to be genetically limited, then getting any better at it may be harder for you, but picking up a sport like football would probably still be much easier for you if you trained your running first regardless. IQ being genetically determined can impact other things like motivation; i.e. if you have a low IQ things will be harder for you, making you less likely to pursue skill acquisition in the future, and conversely, a high IQ may predispose you to acquiring more skills since they come so easily to you, but the point is that neither absolutely determine how many skills you can/will acquire.
I made a 'bold' statement because it's just that practical of a perspective to take[2]. And science backs it up not only in terms of all the positive effects exercising brain plasticity brings[3], but also in the fact that IQ isn't an end-all be-all metric. It is significant, and highly correlated to other important things like life expectancy[4], but IQ itself is not the limit. A built-in limit to skill acquisition would have to come somewhere else down the line if there is one. I study this stuff on my free time because it interests me, I'm not an expert/scientist, so trying to discover a well-defined concrete limit to skill acquisition is beyond my domain, but stuff like epigenetics and plasticity is making it harder to believe there is one.
[1] I believe the last cite in my previous comment shows an example of this. Also, I myself have a pretty average IQ of ~114 or something, but this view has allowed me to learn a surprising number of skills before I even knew any of the science around it, so of course I'm biased and wanted to share.
[2] Well, that and the fact that most people simply don't bother to look at painfully constructed source lists anyway, making the endeavor of compiling them less worth it.
[3] One example: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2003/september24/dementia.html
[4] http://www.mrc.ac.uk/About/AnnualReview09-10/SevenAges/Elder...
I think you are falling for this in certain places as well, for example when talking about genetic skill level limitations you jump right to physical athleticism, which is something people are somehow able to accept more easily, while there is strong evidence that intellectual abilities are open to limitations of the same kind.
IQ is an imperfect measure that is at best correlated with the "quality" of ones genetic endowment, but it doesn't mean that the genetic limitations are any less real. This is the very old and heated debate of "nature vs. nurture", and I would appreciate your comment much more if you also included views of the "opposing" side and moderated your claims to what the research really says, while I think you are making some big extrapolations. That is not to deny the possibility of "learning to learn" or to discourage learning, but you used very strong phrases.
The system is much too complex to assume that just because we don't have what amounts to total 'free' will that we're hopeless to improve anything at our level of operation. If someone's determined (pun intended) to be a defeatist, then alright, but some others are just waiting for the right inputs to take them down a more useful branch of execution. Because just like a program, even though everything is neatly outlined and determined, that doesn't mean you know what every output ever will be. That's why I don't think 'hardcore' determinism to the point of discouraging choices is a useful view to take, much like how hardcore philosophical skepticism is a dead-end line of logic; neither really provide anything you can build off of, so while they may ultimately be true, they're poor models for productivity. I mean, it's possible that you're right and I'm just having a hard case of cognitive dissonance, but it seems to me like extrapolating deterministic genetic algorithms to argue against useful high-level perspectives is still making a lot of assumptions about the implications of such a system. Meanwhile, I'm just reporting observations that been found with regards to skill acquisition.
[1] The phenomenon depicted on this episode of Radiolab with regards to Transient Global Amnesia is particularly damning (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/oct/04/ ), because it shows that when given all the same inputs, you're likely to perform the exact same actions over-and-over again. The separated twin studies on IQ also show a remarkable number of personality similarities amongst twins (besides IQ), which indicates a possible genetic component to random things like sense of humor. There's no hard evidence that any of these things are genetically determined of course, but meh. Let's also not forget that epigenetics and GMOs exist, though it may be a while before that becomes useful for GATTACA-like situations, lol.
[2] Yes, genetics and other deterministic factors count as inputs. If you want to reach a branch of logic that requires AND-ing with a genetic component you don't have, then tough luck, but a simple OR with some other less deterministic input is equally possible. Of course, this is just another hypothetical model to cope with our lack of understanding.
Greeks celebrated such great thinkers. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon and Michael Servetus were all amazing polymaths. - They had expertise in Math, Engineering, Philosophy, Art, Finance. (Perhaps not marketing because such a thing didn't exist back then.)
There have been such multi disciplinary experts in the world and I'm sure there continue to be. But they are rare and often found pursuing interest in one of the areas.
If you can understand tech there is no reason you cannot understand sales and vice versa. - In fact being blind to an alternative point of view isn't even a feature of a man of class. And if you can understand it, why can't you think the same way.
There would be no Apple.
FWIW, they really did appreciate each other. I'm not sure what could have made things work out better - but note that Jobs left too (i.e. kicked out). It's turbulent waters, hard to plan.
fun fact when the iPhone 4S was publicised as having "dual-core graphics", Woz complained that this technical detail was not relevant to users, only the result was. He appreciates Jobs' perspective better than present-day Apple does.
Yes, 10% is what was meant, even if it was unintentional.
Its a bit old, but quite good.
All Hail the King Jobs.
;)
1) I like this typo.
2) I can't imagine how you made it. Dvorak keyboard?
The mother of all demos: http://youtu.be/JfIgzSoTMOs
Is well worth watching for a historical perspective if you haven't seen it already.
The minds from the beginning of the century XX were the best.. even about computing.. invent things from virtually nothing is pretty hard
A lot of people are uncomfortable talking plainly about their own importance or about other people's failings. And then you get the odd megalomaniac who's the opposite. It's refreshing to see someone who's comfortable talking about people honestly.
I don't think anyone wanted to watch Jobs after seeing the trailer.
If what we are hoping to learn from 'Jobs' or The Social Network is "How did this guy do it? What personal qualities can I emulate, what situations can I apply the same approach in", then it is only valuable if it is accurate.
After all, if the narrative is something the writer more or less made up (i.e. he's missed out the bit where Jobs goes into the wilderness and comes back another person), then what the movie teaches us is coming from the writers head. The writer didn't build a leading company, so I am not really interested in what he thinks about how to do it.
Is this the view of the general public? That Apple is doomed if they don't release iWatch or whatever that's bigger than the iPhone/iPad?
On the other side, different analysts say both the watch market and the TV market are too small to matter, so Apple is also doomed if they do. That the MP3 player, smartphone and tablet markets were also "too small" before Apple released their products hasn't entered their mind.
Secondly, the portion of that market that buy "techie" phones as opposed to what's effectively a variation of a bracelet is vanishingly small, so the size of the overall watch market is irrelevant.
The Social Network may not be factually accurate but I enjoyed it and watched it again. I'm guessing this will be similar.
>> "It would have been true to their intent (entertainment)"
OF COURSE their intent is entertainment! It's a movie!
And he being there in person has some weight to what he says.
Jobs worship was already out of control during his second stint, with success of iproducts, but to revise the history to such an extent that it takes credit away from pretty much everybody who worked towards making Apple a successful company is not entertainment.
And what does that have to do with linking to a auto playing video? Do you automatically switch tabs after loading it and then get confused which tab has your video?
Yeah, I've been meaning to try that Chrome feature out. I'm still on FF22 at the moment.
Do you automatically switch tabs after loading it and then get confused which tab has your video?
Typically I'll middle-click links to open them in separate tabs without switching to them, then read the tabs later when I have time, sometimes even the next day. So I end up faced with a row of dozens of tabs, one of which is making unsolicited racket.
A poignant reminder that sometimes effort put into learning that new language/framework/methodology should be redirect into "what really basic web-browsing techniques have I managed to miss all these years"
(also some laptop allows you to define middle click as triple finger clicking on the trackpad)
http://fakevalley.com/steve-jobs-actually-lived-for-150-year...
It's not like there is not considerable source material to work with (even without Isaacson's book if you're concerned about the "other" movie).
It just feels like someone has asked the press to deliberately drum up negative opinions specifically in regards to the true validity of the movie (not, you know, overall quality) and it will likely drive people out in droves.
Can't find details of when or if it's coming to the UK...
On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can't imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie's influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.
Taken from https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cn...
Geek C comes along and tells Geek B that he's clueless, because Geek Icon B was just a poseur who spent his career harvesting the intellectual fields that had been plowed and sown by the even more obscure Geek Icon C. And so on, ad infinitum.
I halfway expect someone else to stumble on that thread and inform the author that he's an idiot because he doesn't realize that Dennis Ritchie is no more than a pimple on John McCarthy's back (not my opinion, just the sort of binary thinking and argumentation that I've observed in these types of threads).
It's also an example of geek self-importance: the idea that the only thing that matters is writing code. It reduces the value of anyone involved in the creation of a piece of hardware or software who wasn't writing code or soldering stuff to nil. People say this stuff to feel better about themselves at the expense of other people that they feel get too much credit. There's some truth to it, of course, but it's rarely expressed as a gray area. It usually comes in the form of, "hey, you know that guy who everyone thinks did everything? Really, he did NOTHING! Nothing at all. This other guy that most people never heard of did EVERYTHING." Which is just as intellectually dishonest as the idea that the first guy did everything.
Woz has his own fame, so I don't see this as a jealous rant, but I do see it as a guy waving his arms screaming to the public "HEY HEY, I AM STILL HERE! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!"
EDIT ---- Yeah down vote me, my bet is you didn't watch the whole video.
I bet ya dollars to doughnuts that Woz did not contact the media first. His phone probably didnt stop for days with media ringing him up trying to goad something out of him.
Personally I'm not impressed with the way Hollywood changes history, especially recent history. For many, Hollywood's version becomes the official version.
PS, I can't downvote and seriously dislike drive-by downvoters. Or people that downvote because they disagree. Or most downvoting in general really...