Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
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A lot can be discerned about famous personalities by who they choose to follow. For example, you can tell whether the person has little utility for social networks but maybe started out following a scattering of experts relevant to their interests.
Usually though, the personality is using their handful of followed people as an importance signalling factor. Often they will be following somewhere between -5e6 to 10 hugely important to unbelievably hugely important people; people with names like Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Paris Hilton, Bono, Lord Vishnu and Kanye West.
On the other hand we have those like Steve Wozniak - following nearly 5000 people and deigning to reply to someone even the likes of HN commenter OGC is completely unaware of.
That is, in all seriousness, an incredible sign of sustained humility.
As anybody who has ever worked a generic job knows, some people treat you like people, and some treat you like a used tissue. This particular conference had an amazing volunteer crew that had been together for years, many of whom had serious day jobs: brilliant designers, high-tech executives, etc. Knowing that the volunteers were gems, I knew that how the famous conference speakers treated them was all about the speakers. I didn't think famous people would really do the, "Do you know who I am?" thing, but I saw it happen.
Anyhow, Wozniak was one of the best. Warm, friendly, genuine. I remember one year he showed us a magic-shop gizmo he had just acquired, delighted by the cool effect they had contrived. Since I had grown up hacking on my Apple ][+ and kinda idolizing him, it was both a pleasure and a relief to learn that he was just as swell to everybody as you'd expect him to be.
Something like this maybe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_sensitive_person
Even more interesting, is this model that describes how some of the negative stuff (shyness, nervousness) related to having high sensitivity can be overcome by the subset of that population that go on to accomplish great things:
Not sure how much it has changed (revisions) but my old copy has a few chapters on Woz.
It's only in retrospect that we have the luxury of looking on his track record as smart from a business standpoint. Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. Which tells you a lot about what separates Woz from Jobs.
Folks like Woz were a big influence on Jobs. So were a bunch of other people. The idea that he just took other peoples' ideas and marketed them is the same old trope. He took the best raw, undeveloped ideas from the billions around him and fit them to together and refined them into something accessible to everyone. VERY FEW people can do that well. He proved he could do it, not just once, but countless times in multiple categories.
While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too often humbled those people making his products possible. This is not cool at all. I refuse the viewpoint that a manager has to be that way to implement his vision.
Since the era of Romanticism in the 19th century, we like to think in terms of "Geniuses" and look out for them to admire them. This is pretty sad, because it should be well known by now, that only with collaboration real products and inventions can be delivered.
And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?
We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they, more than anything, demonstrate the height of Steve's capability of creating a company and product. Anybody who used Sun's Desktop OS and associated applications 5 years later saw how far ahead of the market NeXT was. I thought it was a far superior product to the Macintosh, which, by 1993/1994, was starting to get long in the tooth, and by 1996/1997 had fallen behind Windows in platform power/flexibility, causing me (never particularly religious about the platform I worked on - best tool for the job and all) to leave the Mac behind and switch to Windows (Followed by a switch back in 2003 when OS X took the lead again)
Does anyone honestly think Apple would exist today (and certainly not in it's current dominance) were it not for this single individual?
And, is it really a coincidence that Pixar rose to the heights it did with Steve at the helm?
Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. Designers/Architects are somewhat more rare, but they can be identified, recruited, and hired.
But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness.
Certainly doesn't mean we have to like them as people though.
Now, he didn't always win (most memorably in his ejection from Apple by the board), and sometimes this egomania had catastrophic effects - from his personal life, and most likely to his own health, where he refused to accept other people's opinion of what the best course of action was. You can argue and shape some people minds, but ultimately you can't win an argument with nature.
It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.
[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester
It does rather support the idea that hero worship is a really bad waste of time at best, and downright dangerous at worst...
Putting Pixar's success on Jobs alone is a huge disservice to the true believers that actually built Pixar.
Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
I don't think I worship Steve Jobs, nor do I think he's a hero. But I don't think anybody can second guess what he accomplished in his many careers. If it had just been the Apple, we could have ascribed that to Woz. Or the Macintosh, we could have suggested Raskin was the key, Or Next was all about Avie Tevanian, or Pixar was all about Lassiter, Or iMacs all about Jonie Ives, or iPod all about Fadell, or Apple 2.0s resurgence all about Tim Cook, iOS was all about Forstall, or the iPhone/iPad...
But, there's a common thread to all of those creations - and yes, behind all of them were massive collaborations of incredibly talented people, lead by inordinately brilliant designers, engineers, and architects - but in the center, unreasonably demanding and pushing, was Jobs.
That's all I think we need to give him credit for, but no less.
To me at least, what makes Jobs most interesting is what he achieved despite being an asshole and how that played out. He undoubtedly was a thoroughly unpleasant individual and people who worked with him will queue around the block to tell you that, but he also, coming from a pretty low baseline, turned Apple into the largest company in the world by getting many of those same people who will tell you he's an asshole to build genuinely great products.
The most interesting people are rarely one thing or the other - that's what makes them interesting.
Bill Gates didn't do that as some sort of goodwill gesture, he did it because he felt it was right for MS.
Wasn't the money put into Apple part of a deal after Microsoft was found with source code for Quicktime getting into their own video software?
The "Microsoft believes in Apple" from that might be more Job's reality distortion field. :-)
But going back to the original point, if that's true you could say that Apple was in a slightly better state than it might have appeared (in that it had leverage over MS that it could use that might not have been obvious at the time) but I don't think it significantly undermines the idea that Jobs did a fairly remarkable job in turning Apple around.
After all, MS and many other companies had far more resources than Apple even with the settlement and none of them had the same level of success Apple enjoyed during that period (or since).
The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
A Network engineer who is a 'Hero' and can never go on vacation, is worth much less than a network engineer who has built an environment that any random Taos CCIE can come in and manage with a couple days cross training.
Ironically, from that perspective, the more fungible [1] a network engineer is, the more valuable they are.
The fact that you see such a stark difference between a first-class network engineer and the work of lesser mortals is proof that they aren't fungible.
I'll also point out that you have, perhaps unintentionally, changed the topic from design to maintenance. We're talking about product creation. Some people like to pretend that all the design happens in the head of the person with "designer" on their business cards. But anybody who has spent time in a team making great products knows that everybody is involved in design. It can't be otherwise, because design happens at the intersection of desire and possibility, and the technologists know the possibility space more deeply than anybody else can.
That a well-designed network can be easily maintained is demonstrates the great design skills of that first-class network engineer. That there are long periods in a network's life when design skills aren't needed isn't proof that technologists are interchangeable; it's proof that they aren't.
A great CEO, after he has built a good team and a good strategy can just let the company sailing along for a decade. He is just as fungible as the network engineer. I mean, Jobs died and Apple didn't immediately go bankrupt, another CEO just stepped in, and either cruise along ( or picked up where Jobs left of, future will tell )
The big difference between the 2 is the immediate impact and that's more a cultural thing than anything. If you look at it from an engineering point of view, you avoid at all cost to design anything with such a fragile, expensive and exposed element as is the CEO role in a business the size of Apple.
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.
Diamond Rio MP3 player - 1998
Napster - 1999
iPod - 2001
After that, everything they made was a minimal white box with rounded corners and the rest is history. LOL.
Elon musk?
For me, we're still under Jobs' reality distortion field. I mean, which companies did he build? NeXT which did interesting technology but basically died in the market. Pixar where there's significant dispute about his level of involvement and he may have been more an angel investor.
And Apple. Huge, sure. But he was kicked out the first time round for focusing exclusively on a product that was losing money hand over fist, was both more expensive and less capable than rival products, and which was never more than a minor niche player (albeit stably so), squandering the Apple II's early work. When he returned it was some years before they regained serious success, and that was largely with iOS. Which, by the time of his death, was already losing market position in both phones and tablets, a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did, for similar reasons - one manufacturer and a few devices simply can't innovate as fast as a whole army of rivals cooperating. He built great products, but a great company to live for a lifetime?
Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have even 0.1% of Steve Jobs' success. He was a visionary, a brilliant marketer and an excellent communicator. But I'd suggest his personal single-minded obsession interfered with his ability to hear the market reaction to his products, and the consequence of that was not companies that last a lifetime.
I'm a Musk fan, but Jobs had a huge body of work in fantastic products/movies that his enterprises created under his leadership.
a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did
There's your problem right there. You're somehow equating number of clone devices out there to Jobs's visionary ability to create entirely new markets with products and services that were then copied endlessly.
Number of cheap clone devices out there produced by third party manufactures was never Jobs' goal. How is IBM doing with that whole computer clone business, by the way?
On the former, it's a fairly modern phenomenon for anyone to start multiple companies that succeed and grow to a large size (unless you look at historical periods now recognised as having been infamously financially unstable, like the Dutch tulip boom years). Those who were equally if not more successful than Jobs just didn't bounce from company to company, but invested their efforts in one place.
As to the latter question, I think you'll find that there are quite a few people who could lay equal claim to (a) producing that many great products, and (b) having created the products Jobs is credited with.
Personally, I think you're all overlooking something. The people who work in our industry are by and large professionals. And a professional does what the boss says because that's what the salary is for. It's not like we get the salary anyway and then do what the boss says if we feel like doing it or think he's inspiring enough!
So, to give an anecdotal example, when the iPad prototype comes to Jobs and he does that fish tank routine and says "aha- air bubbles, therefore you can still squash it down more", that's just being an arsehole to people who work for you. What, you think they had a dozen prototypes just so the boss could dunk one in water, destroying it? They're paid so that if he says "squash it more please", they go do it. That's what engineers do. The teenage drama queen nonsense isn't required.
And if you believe the arsehole-ness is a necessary thing to be a genius and get things done, you have been watching far too much House for your own good.
Honestly, the more you learn about Jobs, the less you see that you'd hold up to your kids as a role model; whereas the more you learn about Wozniak, the more you see that you'd hold up.
And we're still only talking about the technical work; nobody's commented yet on the moral issues surrounding the actual manufacture of products like the iPhone. Lovely device; but is that worth the human abuse it takes to manufacture it?
As an EE-type dude Woz's design work was pretty impressive. He's in no danger of being worshipped like a Williams, Pease, or Widlar (much less a Tesla) but he's at most only one tier down. Lets say he's in the top ten, or in serious competition to be in that class. Multiple independent people repeatedly come up with the phrase "elegant" to describe his electrical design work.
So calling a highly skilled stuffed suit the designer and the guy who did all the good design work a mere plumber is somewhat historically revisionist. For that matter I don't think either of them would have gotten as far as they did without teaming up, so other than some desire to dominate, there's not much point in placing one higher than the other.
What it is, is a highly effective social commentary. A genius grade stuffed suit gets all the credit. A genius grade designer is a mere plumber to be used as a resource by the really important person, that being the stuffed suit. In other words, it sucks.
I don't think that's a general rule though, compare Tim Cook and Jony Ive. (Maybe I'm reading too much MacRumors for my own good, though...)
Woz seems in his comment and from comments in this topic to have wonderful integrity, and empathy. He builds cool things because he can and because he wants to help others. He had incredible intellectual power and expertise in a newly developing field and worked in almost all aspects of it.
Jobs on the other hand had an incredible business sense. He lacked the empathy that Woz had but had the drive which actually put certain products out to market where they reached millions and millions of people.
I think this is very much a case of comparing apples to oranges.
Who would you rather hang out with and have as your lead engineer? Woz. Of course. No brainer.
Who would you rather have as your lead business man, innovator, and idea man? Jobs. No brainer.
Are there things both can probably be faulted for? Sure. Are there things that both can be idolized for? Sure. You don't have to idolize an entirety of a person. Just like no one things you idolize wife beaters for liking Rick James music, or idolize pedophiles for liking Michael Jacksons. The list of people who've done incredible things but had terrible sides to them is tremendous. And the list of terrible things is incredibly subjective in a lot of cases. Is being an asshole manager who accomplishes amazing things a bad thing? Yes to some and no to others. It's a very gray area I believe.
I don't think Jobs was a designer per se. He set ambitious goals for other designers to accomplish, maybe.
Jobs was great at recognizing talent, motivating talent, browbeating talent until it quit, and then taking credit for whatever that talent accomplished.
By the same token, a few successes are truly impressive. It takes a lot of execution and judgment to avoid many, many pitfalls.
It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable terms. Jobs liked to make fun of Amelio, which always struck me as a little ridiculous.
People like to latch on to Jobs's personality quirks as being strange, wonderful advantages but I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been if he'd actually developed a better ability to work with and persuade people like John Sculley and his board. The world could have been pretty different if he'd had the people skills to hang in there at Apple. NeXT being developed within Apple might have meant big early success, which might have meant things going a pretty different way in the nineties...
I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.
To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties.
If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem.
Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects.
Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.
Nothing more need be said, really. This is the very definition of character and integrity.
He's a great engineer, but unfortunately for big-budget film-makers, isn't a name that'll draw people into the box office.
Screenwriter is Aaron Sorkin - he also wrote the screenplay for The Social Network.
I love this. Classic Steve Wozniak humor.
The reason to ask that question is because it gives a clue, which person and which principles we ought to celebrate more.
Why does either need to be celebrated more? Vision and perseverance, determination and resolve, integrity and magnanimity are all culturally celebrated virtues.
To honor one man while denying the other is to ignore part of what made that endeavor the success it was.
Jobs was but one part, and emulating only him will leave almost anyone miserable, despised, lonely and broke.
It's sad that besides being underappreciated for engineering feats that are, even today, awe-inspiring, Woz is often thought of as the stereotypical nerd with no interests outside of tech. He was just as passionate about music as Jobs was, and has a great sense of humor besides.
Quite the contrary, it seems to me that a lot of geeks and nerds are very passionate about their musical tastes. Classic example is Patrick Volkerding and Grateful Dead.
Tbh, it's sad that Woz comes out of the woodwork once in awhile to carp on his one-time partner. Yes Jobs was an ass-hole but Woz has all of the money in the world to get high, get a young nice-looking woman and play League or Dota2. In terms of the "intellectual man" who got snubbed by the "type-A asshole," Woz should learn from Paul Allen who reinvented himself as a renaissance man who long moved on from computing to owner of the Seattle Seahawks and blues guitar extraordinaire who jams with Clapton. At the very least, try going to the gym to get rid of that atrocious love-handle of his.
It dishonors both men to allow falsehoods to become the accepted truth. If someone tried to convinced the world that everything that you accomplished in your life was the result of someone else's effort, and they all bought into it, I'm sure you'd be at least a little upset by it.
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/woz-paul-allen-stop-patent-trol...
Jobs did things everyone thinks they can do, so he's worshipped as a god.
I'm half-kidding. Half not.
He also invented the industry that was able to deliver power to homes so they could use those light bulbs.
Me, I tend to give the credit for the invention to Edison, while acknowledging that he stood on the shoulders of others. It's how credit is done for most inventions.
Edison's contribution was to pay them enough so they could eat and live, and point them at a project.
And Edison's an even more interesting example to bring up in a Jobs discussion because of the whole history between himself and Tesla (and if nothing else tells you about the man's character, the elephant-electrocuting nonsense during the current wars would tell you all you needed to know).
Edison's long string of inventions suggest his contribution was far more than that. (And the money used to pay his staff came from his prior inventions, Edison was not born rich.)
> elephant-electrocuting nonsense
We find that reprehensible today. But people at the time did not, and it's better to judge him in the context of his time.
Correct me if i am wrong, but i thought Edison was a proponent of DC current, rather than AC (it was tesla who pushed AC). I might have those two mixed up though.
You don't have to pick a favorite. You don't need to figure out which one pulled more weight. It seems likely that if you removed one, the other would have failed.
edit: chill out folks, I don't mean either guy would have been a penniless itinerant without the other. I'm saying they were much more successful together than apart. I know it's popular here to hate on the charismatic businessperson and praise the technical genius, but the best companies will have both.
Jobs on the other hand struggled in nearly every aspect of his life, he couldn't stick with college, he got a job at Atari based on someone else's work, he was such a giant douche to everyone there that they wanted to fire him, he lied to the few friends he had and manipulated them to get money, he knocked someone up and then pretended that his daughter didn't exist, the list goes on.
Steve Wozniak would have had a great life either way. Jobs would probably have died homeless and friendless if Apple never existed.
Jobs proved his talents in many ways as the CEO of Apple, but if it weren't for Wozniak, Jobs likely would have never had a chance to show us what he could do.
Besides Apple, Pixar and Next made Jobs billionaire too. So, no jobs would not have died homeless and friendless :-) . Jobs was a natural leader and visionary.
For starters, Steve Jobs didn't invest in the Pixar that you know (the one which makes films), it was a hardware company and it never occured to him to make an animated movie, just sell hardware. It was the people working there that saw the potential for films made 100% with computers.
He didn't even pay much attention to Pixar until after they made the deal with Disney to make Toy Story and critics started saying it was going to be huge. After that the "visionary" took charge and, of course, took all the credit for himself.
You can read more about it in the link below. You aks who Alvy Ray Smith is? Well, one of the cofounders of Pixar and its first Vice President. And by the way, he was the inventor of the Alpha Channel. http://alvyray.com/Pixar/PixarHistoryRevisited.htm
But he fails so hard on so many things, like the Steve Jobs investment didn't save Pixar rant. He says Steve's money didn't save Pixar and then says that Steve pumped more and more money in until it was actually worth something.
Whatever points he makes that may be valid are completely made suspect by his tone and spiteful attitude.
If Apple had never existed, he wouldn't have had the hundreds of millions dollars that he spent on these endeavors.
>Jobs was a natural leader and visionary.
Jobs was good at recognizing when the right time to bet on a technology was. When you are filthy rich, you can turn this talent into a license to print money. When you aren't already rich, it just makes you the average person on HN.
I can predict the success and failure of specific technologies with a staggering degree of accuracy, and I'm sure that most of the techies here can do the same thing.
Was anyone here surprised that RIM's brushing off of the capacitive touch-screen launched them into a death-spiral?
Was anyone here doubting that moore's law, flash memory, and high-resolution touch-screens would eventually make it possible to create a tablet that consumers would actually want?
Was anyone surprised that Android overtook a platform that was designed from the ground-up to serve as a symbol for exclusivity? Guess what happens when you launch with only one of the four major carriers? You just gave up any advantage you gained from being first to market.
This shit is obvious to people who live for technology. Steve Jobs didn't create the iPhone or the iPad, the electrical and computer engineers who saw it coming a few decades ago did. They saw potential and so they spent the best years of their lives developing the technology that would one day make it possible.
I'm not saying that Steve wasn't talented, because he was. I'm just saying that it takes more than talent, intelligence, and leadership ability to succeed at the level he did. There's a random element to it, and this random element is the largest factor.
There are thousands upon thousands of talented, smart people with ideas that could change the world. Most of them, if they ever even get a chance to try, will end up being crushed by a world that is reluctant to change.
Steve jobs was an entrepreneur. He did not had millions of dollars when he started with Apple so he could have also started with something else besides Apple and money would have came along as it did with Apple.
I agree with you there are so many genius people in this world. Not everyone gets to see Jobs like magnitude of success. I guess luck, tireless persuasion of your dreams, target also play part in your success rate
Assuming he had a Woz, perhaps. Perhaps he would have found another engineer, or perhaps Woz had a unique combination of skills that really meant Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
Jobs failed in his vision - a lot. Had the Apple II not kept Apple plodding along - remember what Woz said about Jobs's desire to kill it - and some of the strategic investments along the way from outside (Microsoft's investment of $150M when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy), Apple would be a memory today.
I know that violates the meme on HN and elsewhere that Apple's success is purely the result of Jobs's genius and vision, but that's a rewriting of history.
Jobs recognized the right time to bet on the personal computer when he had almost no money, and started Apple. You seem to be inferring Jobs always had a lot of money, which just isn't true.
I'll tell you why. Things aren't so obvious when you have some skin in the game.
To become a household name as a genius capable of predicting the future you most certainly do.
>I'll tell you why. Things aren't so obvious when you have some skin in the game.
I'll tell you the real reason why: I make enough money to cover my living expenses, and that's about it. I am right about technology most of the time, but I don't have enough expendable income to afford ever being wrong. I'm not saying that I would be a wealthy investor if I obtained a few million dollars to get started with, there are a lot of other variables that determine how well suited a person is to that kind of work, and I'm fairly certain that its not for me.
I'm just saying that Jobs wasn't some kind of futurist demigod.
It's also pretty well agreed on (mainly from scientific studies into the actual results of investors) that this is not only bullcrap, but believing it's true was a major contributing factor in the enormous economic disaster we're all still living through right now. I'd like to say how galling it is to see someone hasn't learnt the basic hubris-based lesson we paid so much for -- except that I really can't express that in words adequately.
Are you sure you actually understand what nicholas actually argued? All nicholas (as well as me) wrote is that your decision making changes completely when you have something on the line. And of course it would! So what are you talking about?
Hahahahahaha. Yes.
I don't think he is a billionaire. Googling "net worth woz" finds several articles citing a net worth around $100 million.
But the point still stands (just at 1/10 the level.)
You do get, don't you, that there's no real difference between personal wealths of $100 million and $1000 million? And that there shouldn't be? Why do so few people get that there's a ceiling here? You earn enough money so that you can live off the interest of what's in your bank account, and congratulations, your financial worth is now $MAX.
Seriously. $MAX is a real thing in the real world. It's where you can stop working for money and start spending all your life with your kids, or doing the things you want to do regardless of the mortgage and the food bills and the school bills and so on.
Folks who think $MAX is a naive concept... need to grow up a little bit and remember that life ends and if you don't enjoy it during it, you don't get to enjoy it afterwards.
I don't get why you wrote what you did as a response to mine; I just made a factual correction. (I even stated that the point still stands.)
Edit:
This was not an argument over the meaning of the word 'billionaire'; the post I replied to likely assumed that Wozniak was a billionaire (defined in the way that over 99% of Americans would understand it) and I mentioned that it doesn't seem that is the case.
If you're arguing about the alternative definitions of 'billionaire', it could have been an interesting sidenote, but ultimately the definition that I am using is what most Americans (i.e. the country Woz lives in) would assume and to use another definition in this context is poor communication.
The whole point of the post I responded to was just saying that if Woz wasn't working with Jobs, he might not have been as rich as he is now; no judgment was made on what it means to be "rich enough", etc.
When you're talking about personal wealth, there's a real danger of money going from a tool to do stuff; to being a way to keep score. And that latter road leads to the worst kind of arsehole-ry (damn, that needs a better word).
Not sure why a simple correction turned out to be controversial. I was wrong and you corrected me. I'm not offended so no one else should be either.
Unless you're religious or believe in fate, Jobs life would probably be very different. He could become a successful artist or car salesman or crack cocaine dealer, but unlikely a tech visionary.
No, he left shortly after.
> Then he came back and lo and behold, not just did a good job of running the company but turned it into world's biggest company by market cap.
The company struggled when Jobs was outed in the first place.
> Could Woz have done that?
Probably not, Wozniak is not a businessman. But I have a better question, could Jobs become a leader of Apple and figure of note in first place if he had not walked on Wozniak with already complete Apple prototype? There's a lot to be said to being in the right place at the right time.
I think investors, employees, and the public, want/need to be lied to about how easy it all is. You have to do impossible things but then completely deny all the work that goes into it, and act like it's just because you're great.
I have to say: That speaks volumes. And Woz, if you ever happen to read this: It's still a pile of dough in the year 2014.
Tech salaries were lower then relative to other salaries, so if you look at it in terms of how much money it would have meant to people, it would probably be more than that. I believe people were also much stingier about equity then, so I expect they saw it as a kingly bonus.
Another way to compare it would be to look at what would have happened if they had, as many did, bought houses in Silicon Valley. That's a much higher inflation rate.
But the most fun way to think about it (and in some ways least accurate as well) is asking, "What if they kept the stock?" Google shows shares of Apple trading then for three bucks and change, so call it 3 million shares of today's stock. So that's $1.6 billion of Apple stock in today's market.
If you wanted to use significant figures, it would make more sense to say $28 million or $28.4 million. Going to one significant figure is overkill. Whether you trust the CPI or not, those that made it chose more than one digit for it. Also I feel it's just a coincidence that Woz chose a round 10. I think he chose to make it a round million, but it could easily have been 5 million or 15 million or even something that isn't a multiple of 5 million instead of 10 million, were the circumstances different.
It is also conceivable that Woz seems distant from this huge financial figure not because of his being a successful "one-percenter" but due to a fundamental disinterest in money.
Pirates is definitely the better of the two for a plethora of reasons.
Were/Are Twitter's, FourSquare's, Google's, Paypall's, etc. Owners like that?
Do we? I'd expect to get the version of the story that sells, which is likely to have added drama.
Might it be that Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates are more prominent than Page and Brin, precisely because of all the stuff we criticise them for?
When I was a kid, he autographed my Apple ][ reference manual (the new spiral bound one that replaced the old Red Book, with the fold-out schematics and 6502 assembly monitor rom listings in the back), "Have fun with your Apple ][. -Woz".
A short, to the point, motivational, practical call to action. I sure did!
But, cue the recent discussion of wealth addiction; $10M was and is enough to have a super comfortable life without working again.
EDIT: I'd like to point out that this book covers everything, up to Jobs death, and is about Jobs, not Apple. There's obviously a lot about Apple, but a good amount about Pixar ,NeXT, and Jobs' personal life as well. A great biography IMO, but it's not much about technology.
It goes in much deeper detail in some Apple aspects (until the Apple II, of course) but it's a nicer book in general (I mean, less rushed)
But they are both great reads.
Nope. Woz gives every impression that he'd be perfectly happy inventing stuff, rich or not. He doesn't really need a Steve Jobs, and the exploitation by someone who presented himself as a friend mostly seems to have caused him a lot of heartache.
That's the whooshing sound as a point goes over your head. You obviously care about that. Jobs obviously cares about that. It is nopt obvious Woz cares about that at all.
The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.
It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.
On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.
Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 (starts 18 minutes in) http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/43
But yes, John Siracusa is a national treasure.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/02/22/the-book-of...
It felt like somebody was lying to me to things I know that are not that way. It was like a creationist teaching me the evolution theory.
I don't claim that The Pirates of Silicon Valley is completely accurate but but Jobs(movie) was out of line. It's not just that it got many facts wrong or lacked very important events, it felt so wrong on many levels, especially the way characters were portrayed.
EDIT: Watch him say it : http://macmothership.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=226
Which is more important in my opinion. I care about the people more than I care about the sequence of events.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ciNXc_4OQ (at approximately 12:10)
I'm a Jobs fan in many - but a fan of what he actually did (minus being a douche), not the myth.
It's interesting thought that someone can be a Woz and still get jealous as if they need more notoriety and attention for what they have done.
By the way if you look at David Geffen you will see many artist who were made by him in one way or another. Geffen became quite wealthy and more wealthy than I believe any of the artists he managed. But they seemed to be happy with their success and aren't looking to say things like "hey if it wasn't for my talent Geffen who could play an instrument (actually I think he could play something) wouldn't be a billionaire." While it is debatable what Jobs would have been without Woz there is no doubt in my mind that Woz would have been a regular talented engineer if he never met Jobs.
You're implying that the only thing that people care about is the end result; the product that rolls off of the assembly line for their use. If that's the case, then they equally don't care what Jobs did.
Same with Walt Disney. (Of course he had a TV show..)
In the case of Ray Croc there was Harry Sonnenborn who was given credit (in the business press but not the popular press) as being the financial brains behind McDonalds. But most "normals" have never heard of him. Have you? (Not a challenge just curious..)
In the case of Ray Croc that was another story of business celebrity that made it main stream. Otherwise at McDonalds all anyone would care about is the food, right?
I guess my point is that (some) people get jealous when someone else has something they don't have. In the case of Woz he has money but he is jealous of the fame that Jobs has (over his fame which of course is considerable, right?). If Jobs wasn't so over the top idealized Woz wouldn't say as much is my speculation.
Of course not everyone wants that fame some people are perfectly happy not being noticed and letting someone else get all the attention. Even if that attention isn't deserved.
All this is a matter of degree of course.
I also seriously doubt the validity of your statements regarding David Geffen and his clients. That's just pure speculation on your part, unless you have some sort of amazing citation(s) you can dig up to support what you said.
None of us will ever know what Wozniak or Jobs would have achieved if they had never worked together.
As a side note, it is not the electronics lab specifically. It is keeping current with the state-of-the-art yourself, working with state-of-the-art stuff at home and letting your kids to fool around...
>Actually, Jobs was not fired. He could have been well funded to develop any product, even something like the NeXT, right at Apple. He was removed from running Macintosh because he had no good constructive ideas that were needed to save the company. He felt that some small adjustments in pricing, and diverting funds from our revenue source, the Apple ][, would make the Macintosh an instant success. The Macintosh was great and was the future in the eyes of those who displaced Jobs. But it was time to be adult and realistic. Hard work to build a Macintosh market would be needed. I’m sad too that the Macintosh wouldn’t sell just on its own.
Joz
...or...
Wobz
...or maybe even...
Wjobz
...and it's up to every member of the audience whether the 'j' is silent or not.
Lesson: learned.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ashton-kutcher-steve-j...
- Most characters didn't exist, they are *inspired* by real persons
- He never had visual hallucinations, only auditory
- The hallucinations started *after* college
- He and his wife divorced in 1963, they only remarried in 2001.
- The pen laying and the Nobel ceremony never happened
- Near the end of the movie, he say he's taking "new meds" while in real life,
he stopped taking them after the mid 70's and he's vocal about it.
The scenarist added it because he or she feared it would encourage people
not taking med.
- Etc.If you see a movie adaptation, you can be pretty sure it's inaccurate. The question of accuracy shouldn't be in the detail; it should be in the message that the movie was trying to tell.
"Ip Man - A Legend is Born", for instance, conveyed Yip Man's desire to spread Wing Chun better than any other movie biography, whereas "Ip Man" best discussed his philosophy of life and "The Grandmaster" put him into a historical context completely ignored by the other movies. They're all factually wrong, but they're wrong with different emphases and strengths because they're expressing different perspectives on the same life.
Hang on... Have I been whooshed? Was that meant to be amusingly naive?
Some times you go so far as making movies like 'Argo' where a total fiasco which led to the demise of a president, is pictured in totally different set-up and served as a success.
And here is the beauty of the Internet. We wouldn't know that, if information wasn't freely flowing online.
This probably makes it sound more intentionally evil than it is. I think the real truth is that "Hollywood story-makers don't believe that reality is good for the box office."
Which is why the OP took a screenshot of it: https://plus.google.com/+CarmsPerez/posts/cDK6ZNpZ6YH (this was the original link; the mods decided this was too convenient).
The lesson in all this is that when you are mass-marketing a story to the public, the truth doesn't sell as well as a greatly altered version of the truth. People want to see a romanticized version of the story, so that is what Hollywood gives them. There shouldn't really be a huge surprise there. If you really want to know what factual events took place in any story, you're probably going to have to do a lot better than a two-hour Hollywood interpretation starring the lead character from Two and a Half Men.
if anybody is into documentaries:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIZGDT7ZqdM
for the german-speaking audience (there might be an english version, couldn't find one though):
I don't see it on my shelf now, but I think it was http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Microsofts-Reinvented-Industry-H... The cover looks familiar, the year is about right, and I have a vague memory of the author being named "Steven".
Yes, it's by far the best biography of Gates, and extremely detailed. However, the first edition was published on January 21, 1994.
[Not that Sorkin would ever produce anything other than a stellar script, anyway]
Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me. I was an engineer at HP designing the iPhone 5 of the time, their scientific calculators. I had many friends and a good reputation there. I designed things for people all over the country, for fun, all the time too, including the first hotel movie systems and SMPTE time code readers for the commercial video world. Also home pinball games. Among these things, the Apple I was the FIFTH time that something I had created (not built from someone else's schematic) was turned into money by Jobs. My Pong game got him his job at Atari but he never was an engineer or programmer. I was a regular member at the Homebrew Computer Club from day one and Jobs didn't know it existed. He was up in Oregon then. I'd take my designs to the meetings and demonstrate them and I had a big following. I wasn't some guy nobody talked to, although I was shy in social settings. i gave that computer design away for free to help people who were espousing the thoughts about computers changing life in so many regards (communication, education, productivity, etc.). I was inspired by Stanford intellectuals like Jim Warren talking this way at the club. Lee Felsenstein wanted computers to help in things like the antiwar marches he'd orchestrated in Oakland and I was inspired by the fact that these machines could help stop wars. Others in the club had working models of this computer before Jobs knew it existed. He came down one week and I took him to show him the club, not the reverse. He saw it as a businessman. It as I who told Jobs the good things these machines could do for humanity, not the reverse. I begged Steve that we donate the first Apple I to a woman who took computers into elementary schools but he made my buy it and donate it myself.
When I first met Jobs, I had EVERY Dylan album. I was a hardcore fan. I had bootlegs too. Jobs knew a few popular Dylan songs and related to the phrase "when you ain't got nothin' you got nothing to lose." I showed Jobs all my liner notes and lyrics and took him to record stores near San Jose State and Berkeley to buy Dylan bootlegs. I showed him brochures full of Dylan quotes and articles and photos. I brought Jobs into this Dylan world in a big way. I would go to the right post office at midnight, in Oakland, to buy tickets to a Dylan concert and would take Jobs with me. Jobs asked early on in our friendship whether Dylan or the Beatles were better. I had no Beatles album. We both concurred that Dylan was more important because he said important things and thoughtful things. So a Beatles fan was kind of a pop lamb to us. Why would they portray us in the movie as Dylan for Jobs and Beatles for me?
And when Jobs (in the movie, but really a board does this) denied stock to the early garage team (some not even shown) I'm surprised that they chose not to show me giving about $10M of my own stock to them because it was the right thing. And $10M was a lot in that time.
Also, note that the movie showed a time frame in which every computer Jobs developed was a failure. And they had millions of dollars behind them. My Apple ][ was developed on nothing and productized on very little. Yet it was the only revenue and profit source of the company for the first 10 years, well past the point that Jobs had left. The movie made it seem that board members didn't acknowledge Jobs' great work on Macintosh but when sales fall to a few hundred a month and the stock dives to 50% in a short time, someone has to save the company. The proper course was to work every angle possible, engineering and marketing, to make the Macintosh marketable while the Apple ][ still supported us for years. This work was done by Sculley and others and it involved opening the Macintosh up too.
The movie shows Steve's driving of the Macintosh team but not the stuff that most of the team said they'd never again work for him. It doesn't show his disdain and attempts to kill the Apple ][, our revenue source, so that the Macintosh wouldn't have to compete with it. The movie audience would want to see a complete picture and they can often tell when they are being shortchanged.
And ease of computer came to the world more than anything from Jef Raskin, in many ways and long before Jef told us to look into Xerox. Jef was badly portrayed.
And if you think that our investor and equal stock holder and mentor Mike Markkula was Jobs' stooge (and not in control of everything), well, you have been duped.
Jobs mannerisms and phrases are motivational and you need a driver to move things along. But it's also important to have the skills to execute and create products that will be popular enough to sell for more than it costs to make them. Jobs didn't have that success at Apple until the iPod, although OS X deserves the credit too. These sorts of things people would have wanted to see, about Jobs or about Apple, but the movie gives other images of what was behind it all and none add up.
It was actually pretty good from BBC (some BBC documentary shows have been proven to be fake in the past)
Why take such a harsh tone?