11–20 of 138 posts
So Apple basically was Steve Jobs. Time to ditch some stock.
If Jobs was Apple, there should still be some skunkworks projects left behind to ship and the numbers are still favorable to Apple.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html
Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently:
>Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field".
>Every. Single. Time.
>Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together.
It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.
Two things that stood-out: >"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M" and >"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."
Between this and the Safari story, I'm struck at just how deep Apple's internal secrecy ethos runs. The idea that there is that level of dedication to keeping a project hidden, not just from outsiders, but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind. It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.
Edit: Forgot a word..
"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers." Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
I doubt anyone actually owned the Sony Mavica for their own "personal" uses. It ran out of battery after 30 pictures or so, and you needed to carry around a bunch of floppies. My crappy disposable camera could take better pictures than that thing.
I'm not sure if I would consider the 3.5" floppy disk as a "relevant sized mass storage" but 1.4mb was probably pretty big in those days. When I bought windows 95, it came in 28 floppy disks.
"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers." Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
I'm pretty sure that at that time I had tons of music (using winamp) and photos on my computer (scanning was the way at that time).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that at that time I had tons of music (using winamp) and photos on my computer (scanning was the way at that time).
You must've been somewhere nice that had fast internet. I think most people back then had dialup, and downloading a single song would take at least 20 minutes on their 28.8k modem.
Obviously many people just ripped their own CDs. Many CD-ROMs didn't support ripping CDs at a data level - so you had to rip in real-time via analog! Crazy.
"In 1991, I started work at NeXT, as Product Manager for Interpersonal Computing. It was the internet, before there was much of an internet. We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW was born."
The web existed in 1991, and Mosaic was launched in 1993. I first saw it in 1993, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. Have I misunderstood his '5 years later' statement?