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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised

50+% of parents are bad? I don’t believe that.

Just sit in public and you'll see parents threaten and humiliate children for the smallest things. It's baffling. The effects of these actions add up and we call it "mental illness".

Not to mention how many parents think assault (smacking) is a "just punishment". It actually achieves the opposite of what it purports, i.e. more violence and disobedience as soon as the children grow large enough to hit back.

And then there is the peculiar acceptance in the USA of male genital mutilation for many non-Jewish children.

We are still in our infancy with parenting.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#252
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.

P(a) = 0.1, P(b) = 0.1, P(c) = 0.8, "Oh, let's only look at cases a and b".

Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#253

It's pretty amazing to me that one of the richest people on the planet (at the time anyway) and arguably one of the most successful tech people ever (Sergey Brin) not only did not see anything wrong with putting all of this illegal stuff down in writing, but he's actually unable to use proper capitalization.

capitalisation is unminimalistic - stevej

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#254
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen brother. He was not a "bully". He was a coach. A tough coach. Anyone could have walked away. No one was being forced to work at a top .1% company in the world. If you were there it's because you wanted to be do your best work and be part of the best. You wanted to make the world a better place. You believed in the power of these devices to do good, and to fight evil. Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on th…

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullying google… I don’t think that’s a thing even if you’re Apple. I think this is just shrewd business.

"Shrewd business", bullying, tomato, tomahto.

Bullying implies a power imbalance. This is google we are talking about.

They did poach a huge chunk of the safari team. They then did launch a competing browser and aggressively pushed that browser globally. They forked the mainline project of WebKit and created blink - for reasons relating to Chrome product roadmap. It was a big deal when they did it.

But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying?

Which CEO wouldn’t be upset at an entire core team being targeted by a competitor? It’s not price fixing, it’s not illegal (to be upset or to call another ceo and complain).

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.

Seems like a small price to pay to assemble the most innovative animation studio that would bring joy to millions of people for decades.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Unless you are the one of course.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#257

Is "billionaires not using correct capitalization and punctuation to appear too important" a thing? Elon Musk seems to do the same thing, and it always surprises me.

Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style.

> Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style.

Over analysis if I’ve ever seen it. Not using capitalization was just a part of 90s Internet culture which both Musk and Brin grew up in.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#258
post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

They had a mutual non compete going. Here’s another instance where a cold recruiting email was “against policy”: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543?s=...

Ah, the free and open marketat work! Sure glad we left the feudal sefdom behind us!

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#259
post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

> Is he just a bully? He spent his whole professional career bullying people and repurposing their ideas into pretty amazing products.

So....a bully.
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