Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (1996)
archive.wired.com
archive.wired.com
And as a guy who ended up being a web developer, he was TOTALLY right about the "dark ages" thing. When Internet Explorer had hegemony, web dev was close to torture... It's what made me a back-end developer. Frontend was too painful.
Whether or not you should look up to Steve Jobs is up to you. Examine the facts about him and then decide whether he is a role model for you. He isn't an infallible role model to everyone by default just because he was successful or in the public eye, nor should he be.
> I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts.
So Apple, Google, Adobe and one other company agreed to not poach employees from each other and get into an expensive wage war. I don't see how that's automatically bad and here's why:
In the dotcom booms, salaries skyrocketed unchecked. During the bust, MANY people got laid off... with a certain salary expectation, which hampered them. I dated someone like this, she spent 6 months going into CC debt trying to swallow the pill that she just wasn't going to make again what she made as a marketer at the height of the first dotcom boom. She literally refused to accept the market rate for herself.
All Jobs, Schmidt etc. did is prevent people from being paid unreasonably (and unsustainably) high salaries. And we're already talking comfortable 6 figure salaries, here. You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked? The guys at the top would eventually get laid off at the first sign of a downturn. And their "net income" would likely be the same as if they never had their pay unsustainably raised to begin with.
An arms race is no good for anyone.
> we'd be able to make more at our work places
So that's bullshit. EVERYONE gets paid market rate, more or less. Anything else is not sustainable or requires someone being fooled indefinitely, which is impossible (unless they are a fool to begin with).
I know not if he did commit adultery but many of accusations were tenacious at best, and in the main downright misleading to the general public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega...
In any case, I don't think Steve Jobs is in the same league as MLK.
There's a difference between disowning your child and riding your workers to the brink versus being rude to somebody at the supermarket. Nobody's saying the iPhone isn't a great achievement, it's just not surprising that some people don't like Jobs as he was a pretty terrible person (personally and professionally.)
Then his decision of alternative medicine to treat his curable cancer. He created technology that touched millions if not billions of people, and a lot of those are kids who probably looked up to him, and then he does stupid shit like that which will influence them in a bad way.
Yes, people are free to do what they want, but I'm also free to call out their stupidity and selfishness.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/471410/20130527/steve-jobs-la...
And in any event, 95% of the people criticizing him for this have not given enough of themselves to be justified in doing so.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/471410/20130527/steve-jobs-la...
Why? People who make a big deal about their philanthropy often do so in order to encourage others to join the cause. How is that in any way a bad thing?
I admire someone who supports a cause because they believe in it and not for the kudos the support may bring them. That isn't to say that I don't admire the super wealthy like Bill Gates and his philanthropic causes. I am really glad he has dedicated such a large chunk of wealth to humanitarian causes.
Do you have an example of someone like this? Someone who flaunts philanthropy and actual harm occurs as a consequence of this?
As for his poor choice regarding his health, it's a bit unclear how that will wrongly influence people. He eventually realized he was wrong and had the operation. The delay may have cost him his life. If anything, he's the poster child on the dangers of waiting too long for treatment.
He just didn't make a big deal about it.
His fascination with alternative medicine is unfortunate but he paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.
"It's certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It's certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It's not going to be that profound."
That's exactly what it was like for me, back in the mid 1990s, using WebChat Broadcasting System for the first time.
I didn't care much for computers growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found them useful primarily for gaming. When I first used the Internet, it was like lightning struck, I knew immediately what it would mean, and how big it could be one day. I viewed it as an infinite canvas. Watching the early explosion of web sites just reinforced that. The computer became nothing more than a vehicle to get to the Internet for me, and it still is to this day. It completely altered my life, growing up in the middle of nowhere Appalachia. It exposed me to a world I would have never touched otherwise. I started my first Internet company with a bunch of Australians circa 1996/97 as a teenager... from nowhere Appalachia. Not as profound as someone in Nebraska hearing a radio broadcast for the first time? I beg to differ.
Well, to someone who was used to procedural level programming, the concepts of object oriented coding were pretty revolutionary. Not surprising if someone who started programming in the last decade finds OOC obvious though.
That passage struck me as odd as well, the answer is: He is selling something to you as you read it.
A bit obscure because the product doesn't really exist anymore as we read it 18 years later.
A cogent argument for more liberal arts education.
It's amazing the passion he had for design in the product creation.
This shows that nearly every bad thing that happens to you ends at some point, and it is up to you to convert it to something good.
Could you expand on this? Was it a move to more consumer testing and validation of product development ideas, or something else?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/24/us-apple-google-se...
Completely agree. Ironically one of the issues now is the pushing of tablets into schools for the sake of it with no real educational use case
Desktop computers -- and today, tablets -- have been round-pegged into the existing school structure: they're aids to do your homework, and that's about it. You can look something up on Wikipedia for your history essay, but want to dick around in Python for 6 hours or build something amazing in Minecraft with people from another continent? Good luck.
Computers are tools of limitless possibility, but I hardly ever see them used that way. Much more often, I see kids use the computers to play shooting games and watch pirated streams of sports broadcasts.
I think this is partly the baneful legacy of Bill Gates, with his attitude that only he gets the privilege of modifying his software and ordinary people pay him to receive his perfect writings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Computers and the Internet are a major challenge to traditional schooling, however. I see very few kids try to wrestle with the questions. For example, in the Great Gatsby, why would Tom lie about Daisy being a Catholic? http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-would-tom-lie-about-... Change a few words, homework is done, time for more League of Legends.
The whole curriculum needs to be redone. We need the freedom to dick around, but we must also recognize that very, very few kids will make anything good out of it.
The internet is conducive to learning; it's not conducive to our educational establishment's hoops.
Interestingly, Apple has become the middleman on mobile that he warned us Microsoft might be on web.
'The defining event of the Jobs 2.0 era relationship between Apple and Adobe was the creation and subsequent scuttling of the Rhapsody project. Rhapsody was Apple's original plan for a new operating system based on the recently purchased NeXT technology.
Rhapsody's proposition for Mac software developers was simple: write your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs. These are the APIs that eventually became Cocoa, and there was much to recommend them even back then. But for Mac developers with substantial existing code bases, the proposition was more aptly phrased, "rewrite your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs."
It was a hard sell, to be sure. The sweetener that Apple hoped would push the deal over the top was that applications written using this API could also be compiled to run on Windows. And so the complete pitch to the Adobes and Microsofts of the world was this: rewrite your huge existing applications using these APIs and end up with a single code base for both Mac and Windows. Alternately, just rewrite the Mac versions of your applications using these new APIs.
The answer from the Mac development community was, essentially, "Yeah, uh, no thanks."'
AngularJS directives are the most modern version of it I can think of. Something somewhat reusable and modular that you can just plug in and run on any page.
But it perhaps has a long way to go before it fulfills what he talked about here, such as encapsulation of CSS in an elegant way, and remote loading.
SJ: To sell!
W: To share.
SJ: To sell!
W: You mean publishing?
Funny how the reporter just hears what he wants to hear. Makes me wonder which of the questions asked today will sound like this in 10 years.
"There are three parts to the Web. One is the client, the second is the pipes, and the third is the servers.
...
On the client side, there's the browser software. In the sense of making money, it doesn't look like anybody is going to win on the browser software side, because it's going to be free.
...
And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware.
...
But with Web server software, no one company has more than a single-digit market share yet. Netscape sells hardly any, because you can get free public-domain software and it's very good. Some people say that it's even better than what you can buy."
I'm not an apple fan, nor a Steve Jobs fan, but this prediction changed a lot of our preceptions about the internet and what computing means.
Whether this vision shaped the internet and computing or it was truly prophetic, I don't know. But still, really interesting to think about how our visions might turn into.
I'm not sure the desktop computer industry will ever really die, at least not soon. Sure, the focus may be shifting more to mobile and web tech, but are we really one day going to be writing apps on our iPhones? Computers, laptop or desktop still have a large foot in the door of the industry, and as long as we still use them they will continue to develop and get better. I'm sure they'll be with us for a while.
That's (part of) how he got there.
Apple might have just become another PC manufacturer if they had someone more centered