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Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

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Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#141

Post by mlajtos »

yardie wrote: post #93
JKCalhoun wrote: post #30

Some 15 years ago or so? I don't remember. I was working at Apple on the color and graphics team. I don't even to this day remember what the exact circumstance was, but for some reason me and another engineer were urgently called into a conference room just a week or so before some big Apple product reveal. I feel like it was when the "Aqua" UI was to be revealed — I feel like it was something about the seven label c…

Around that time I was shipped out to do a video presentation with 3 laptops. 2 of them were cued up with Powerpoint and synchronized to play at the same time. If one went down I could switchover seamlessly. I also had a cold backup laptop in case the 2 running laptops failed. The only presentation I've seen where I think Jobs went off the script was when the 3G and wifi went down in Moscone and the demo phone couldn…

Here are some off script moments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_5KcoSwmg4

Your example starts at 0:18

Edit: Some more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6n-zw8L_84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnVUvW42CUA

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#142

Post by ohwellhere »

timr wrote: post #138
aesopsfable wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to belittle Nokia or anything, they took already available eg. smart calculators' digital displays adopted to GSM phones. Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time (Steve Ballmer reaction*) Although they make great objects of desire, Toyota is no Tesla, Nokia is no Apple. Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an ident…

> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prio…

I think about this a lot from the point of view of economic fairness and wealth inequality.

You have a higher probability of being rich if your ancestors "owned the land" first. Similarly, you have a higher probability of being rich if you "created" the market.

Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.

But the land was always there, and we were always going to continue miniaturizing computers. How big a slice of the pie is fair?

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#143

Post by [deleted] »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #44
GeekyBear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a supposedly unrecognized genius I think his floppy disk controller for the Apple II was pretty widely recognized as real stroke of genius. >The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak's crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibiliti…

And the floppy drives for the C64 were too, a whole computer that could do magic things on it's own. And dozen of other magic things, like Sophie Wilson who I admire most and who did magic things with the Acorns (and of course ARM). The difference is that those people don't spend decades on bad mouthing others. Also the difference is Sophie Wilson does astonishing things all the way until today. Everyone says Wozniak…

[deleted]

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#144

Post by throwaway_4ever »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #122
zcw100 wrote: post #2

What really set Steve Jobs apart is that he never should have gotten to where he did. I don't mean he didn't deserve it or anything but based on that structures that exist to filter people who attain the positions that he did. By luck, or accident, or raw determination, he became a person in the drivers seat that no one would have chose to put there. He was so much not the person they would have chosen that they kick…

Another thing sets Steve Jobs apart that people almost always forget: he was a child out of place, to some extent. He's the biological child of a Syrian muslim immigrant and an American of Armenian descent. And then he's adopted into a sort of purely American life. There's a whole lot of outsiderism to unpack there, and while he adored his adopted parents he seems to have struggled with his own fatherhood roles etc.…

I think his anti-conformity is uniform. You definitely have to buck popular convention to repeatedly lease the same car and wear the same clothes everyday. No one does that.

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#145

Post by unfocussed_mike »

anamax wrote: post #139
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing. And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. But in interviews he was also sort of a studen…

> He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?

I don't think most of them -- maybe any of them -- were his losses originally!

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#146

Post by unfocussed_mike »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #144
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing sets Steve Jobs apart that people almost always forget: he was a child out of place, to some extent. He's the biological child of a Syrian muslim immigrant and an American of Armenian descent. And then he's adopted into a sort of purely American life. There's a whole lot of outsiderism to unpack there, and while he adored his adopted parents he seems to have struggled with his own fatherhood roles etc.…

I think his anti-conformity is uniform. You definitely have to buck popular convention to repeatedly lease the same car and wear the same clothes everyday. No one does that.

It is fascinating to me that Jobs did it and everyone was like like, hey, that's just what he does. At least he showers these days.

But if anyone else consciously adopts that specific affectation they are definitely trying to rip you off. It's a tell.

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#147

Post by seanmcdirmid »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #112
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been interested in whether technical work actually hurts social skills. Correlation isn't causation. Hurt social skills could also lead to more interest in technical work. ALOT of SWEs aren't interested in people management for that reason, and its a blessing that FAANGs allow people to advance on IC tracks (though still developing some communication skills are necessary as your level rises). As for if practic…

I think the point of my comment got lost a bit. It's like when I start diving deep into technical work, my head spins. I get zoned in, later fatigued, and I think there's some behavior change. I notice this even in the short term. Sure you could work on both (and most devs are now), and it could just be how people spend time developing their skills, but I feel there was something more there. I felt a growing disconne…

> It's like when I start diving deep into technical work, my head spins. I get zoned in, later fatigued, and I think there's some behavior change.

I feel the same way with deep social interaction, but diving deep into technical work usually is invigorating, so I guess I can't really empathize. My hardest days at work are full/half day morale events :).

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#148

Post by asveikau »

mrtksn wrote: post #83
hnlmorg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where o…

I don't say anything of that sort. Nokia made the best cellphones in the world and was never surpassed - it's just that people stopped using cellphones. In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to aban…

Symbian was good though. As was Maemo, imo even more so.

Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship.

I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in.

That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#149

Post by hnlmorg »

imwillofficial wrote: post #85
hnlmorg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where o…

Except they are uniquely brilliant. Several world changing products to their name even before becoming the worlds most profitable company in the history of humanity. That’s not overstating things either. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.

You could have said the same about Microsoft, word for word, in the 90s. Similar arguments for Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others too. I even listed several world changing achievements for Nokia in the post you're refuting (if it wasn't for GSM there wouldn't even be an iPhone)

what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too.

Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.

Re: Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

#150

Post by sleepybrett »

aesopsfable wrote: post #123
sleepybrett wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can trace the iphone back to, concretely, the newton but even further back if you check out the concepts that got them to the newton. There is a 1997 book called 'Apple Design 1997 The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group' that shows a ton of concepts and a few 'communication device' concepts (video and audio phone integrated computers). Sadly out of print, and quite expensive for a paperback 'coffee table'…

There is a cheesy movie from Tom Cruise, Minority Report, whomever takes those displays to market, finds a scalable profitable way to produce them, finds enough courage to resist status quo and find massive product market fit, will be the next Jobs or Musk. Idea wise, everything literally was on either Star Trek or on Star Wars previously. I know these personalities are not exactly likeable but we'll keep this conver…

gorilla arms are a thing you cannot dream your way out of. While a display projected 'in air' is cool a standing gesture based ui is very much not.
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