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In Praise of Bad Steve

theatlantic.com

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Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#81

Post by msbarnett »

patrickgzill wrote: post #78
stickfigure wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Pixar, -1 for NeXT. You come out even.

Financially NeXT was a wash, the $400 million paid for it was enough to pay back most of the investors, so they got their money back but no profit. For Apple, having the NeXT talent and what became OSX, it was a success for them. So NeXT had value - it was not a "-1" as a company going bankrupt would be.

Yeah; if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, I don't think it would be considered a failure. Maybe not a great success, but certainly no one would consider it a bad thing.

And if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, and the technologies pioneered at it went on to power almost every major product Google released for the following 15 years, people would consider it a deeply influential and successful company.

People seem to grade NeXT on a very, very steep curve.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#82

Post by mikeash »

msbarnett wrote: post #81
patrickgzill wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financially NeXT was a wash, the $400 million paid for it was enough to pay back most of the investors, so they got their money back but no profit. For Apple, having the NeXT talent and what became OSX, it was a success for them. So NeXT had value - it was not a "-1" as a company going bankrupt would be.

Yeah; if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, I don't think it would be considered a failure. Maybe not a great success, but certainly no one would consider it a bad thing. And if a web startup sold to Google at essentially no profit when you paid out the investors, and the technologies pioneered at it went on to power almost every major product Google released for th…

NeXT is a confusing company to judge. They were slowly dying for years, then suddenly Apple came along and rescued them. Except it turned out that it was NeXT who rescued Apple. But all the subsequent stuff was done under the Apple name, so people just remember the NeXT that built extremely expensive computers, didn't sell very many of them, and nearly went bust before being bought out.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#83

Post by lurker19 »

saturn wrote: post #60
chaostheory wrote: post #24

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Bernard Shaw

I have always thought that quote was ridiculous. What is unreasonable about noticing an improvement can be made in your surroundings, and endeavouring to make it? There is a grain of truth I suppose, vis-a-vis humanity's general restlessness, fixing what ain't broke, etc, but I think that this generalisation that anyone who isn't perfectly happy and satisfied with the exact present state of things is "unreasonable" i…

Being dissatisfied isn't what was considered unreasonable. Thinking that changing the world is easier than changing your expectations is what is considered unreasonable. From a frequentist statistical point of view, that is true. But some people are outliers who are able to bend the world to their will.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#84

Post by lurker19 »

_delirium wrote: post #69
paul9290 wrote: post #9

History shows many luminaries to be like Jobs was or even worse; ruthless and totally unethical. Thomas Edison ( http://www.reformation.org/thomas-edison.html ) comes to mind.

True, though there are plenty of very humble, friendly luminaries as well. Woz and Bob Moog come to mind.

Who is Bob Moog?

The class that includes Edison and Jobs is the class that wins the recognition and respect of the general public, including my 80 year old aunt who has never used an Apple product. I guess of doesn't really matter though, if the luminaries and some of their fans choose not to care what the public thinks. The nice thing about choosing your own definition of success is that we can congratulate both Jobs and Woz for their success even though they reached incredibly divergent outcomes and there is no way they could have ever both reached the same point.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#85

Post by lurker19 »

nikuda wrote: post #37
martey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing as exhaustive of a search as I could, I found a couple of interesting things. The Sony version of the parable seems to center on the Walkman (as opposed to a camera), which was built in the late 1970s, and either Akio Morita or Masaru Ibuka (co-founders of Sony). However, the earliest reference on the Internet to it I can find is from September 2002 [^1], about a year after the iPod was released, making its ori…

Well, the story might well be completely made up, but the chances are higher that it was made up about Sony not Apple. Probably around the time of when the first Walkman was released. Let's not forget that early Apple was modelled after Sony of the time. Also, under the context of Japanese culture the kind of attitude displayed by the 'boss' in the story is less striking or unusual.

It is certainly plausible that Jobs could have heard the Sony story and then marched over to the iPod lab.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#86

Post by iand »

ars wrote: post #47
Alex3917 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So they weren't slaves like blacks in the US south, but they could have still been slaves." Relationships are complicated, maybe its best not to put labels on things. In all seriousness though, regardless of what their specific status was, most societies where people are building things like pyramids tend to be pretty messed up.

A slave is someone who does not have permission to chose his own work, and does not have permission to (or is prevented from) quiting. (Note that I said permission, not ability.) A slave can still be paid. Based on my definition of slave I believe the pyramids were built by slaves.

What evidence do you have that the pyramid builders did not have permission to quit? Its just as likely that they saw it as a huge honour to work on a pharoah's tomb. c.f. French cathedral builders
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