Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 228 posts

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#141

Post by flomo »

linguae wrote: post #139
bobanrocky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was…

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#142

Post by dagmx »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #133
keeganpoppen wrote: post #121

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of…

[flagged]

You know many words can be used colloquially and not literally? Language is contextual and ever evolving.

I’d also be hesitant to call people out for sloppy language when you can’t be bothered to even capitalize stuff.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#143

Post by armadsen »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #133
keeganpoppen wrote: post #121

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of…

[flagged]

It's a figure of speech.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#144

Post by georgeecollins »

When I was younger I read the book "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing". It was a book about Steve Jobs and NeXT, written before Apple bought Next but far enough along that it was clear that NeXT wasn't going to work out.

It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors.

The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#145

Post by jccalhoun »

dmazin wrote: post #5

If you want more on this, I recommend Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Stross. I’m not sure, but it might be the only extensive book about Next other than this new one. Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs. In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.

Maybe my memory is wrong. I haven't read it in years but I don't remember it being a hit piece. I remember liking it quite a bit and thinking it was a really interesting look at NeXT. It is an interesting artifact because it came out in 1993 and the author couldn't have predicted what would happen to NeXT or Jobs.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#146

Post by gyomu »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #121

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of…

> it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring

Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.

Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#147

Post by leoc »

WillAdams wrote: post #13

Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work: - Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design - Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation - Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel - Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho…

My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#148

Post by wlonkly »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #133
keeganpoppen wrote: post #121

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of…

[flagged]

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a metaphor?"

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#149

Post by robomartin »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #121

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of…

> the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses"

In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.

When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#150

Post by WillAdams »

lrivers wrote: post #115
WillAdams wrote: post #13

Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work: - Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design - Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation - Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel - Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho…

I was on the Virtuoso team at Altsys. Until Freehand was murdered by Adobe, there was still a ton of NeXT flavor in it.

Yeah, I was a beta-tester for Freehand/MX and argued then that the NeXTstep code should have been revived to make a Cocoa app rather than the MacOS front-end to make a Carbon app.
Post reply on HN