Woz did things everyone knows they can't do, so he's marginalized as a freak.
Jobs did things everyone thinks they can do, so he's worshipped as a god.
I'm half-kidding. Half not.
Jobs did things everyone thinks they can do, so he's worshipped as a god.
I'm half-kidding. Half not.
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.
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.
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.