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What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

inventor-labs.com

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Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#111

Post by white_devil »

kybernetikos wrote: post #94
kamaal wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading his biography by Walter Isaacson. I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs. At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made. After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him. Walter Isaacs…

This linked article is one of the first things that has made me think of Steve in a positive light. I'm generally fairly negative about him because 1. I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society ( producer products are the future), and I worry that if they e…

> I have a natural aversion to cults of personality and all that goes with them and 2. the Apple vision of the world is about consumer products. I think this is exactly the wrong direction for all of society (producer products are the future)

But producers produce products for consumers to consume. You can't just eliminate the consumer side of the equation. Without one there isn't the other.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#112

Post by nollidge »

cheald wrote: post #26
taligent wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind. I've worked at Apple before and it wasn't that different to every other large corporation. Excluding obviously the hardware design and critical features. But everything else was par for the course. EVERY large company has politics and empire building. Especially when you are a multinational and have a driven workforce.

I've only worked at small (<100 employees) companies, so I guess I've just never run into this. It's a little sad to think that you could work alongside someone and have to consider them a threat rather than an ally.

> consider them a threat rather than an ally.

I think that's a cynical view of it. Like your sibling post from Firehed says, it's probably more about "not getting too many cooks in the kitchen" than being territorial, as well as preventing the poison of uninformed public opinion from killing a project before it was released.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#113

Post by nollidge »

WayneDB wrote: post #110
rlu wrote: post #79

Not to sound harsh but reading that was a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to this: Q: What is it really like working with Steve Jobs? A: It wasn't magic, it was hard work, thoughtful design, and constant iteration. No way, really? Come on, I'm sure everyone on HN knows that this is true for any product.

Also - Am I the only one who thinks that Apple's products aren't really very good?

Of course you're not. But that's not an objective assessment, and neither is the opposite view.

Jobs still managed to create products that a significant chunk of humanity subjectively enjoys. That's not easy.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#114

Post by smackfu »

kenfromm wrote: post #92
bob-wagner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I thought. Disappointed.

You don't know Glenn. He's a natural story teller and while proud of what he's done, he recognizes that he's just one of many people trying to create something that hasn't been created before. In reading into his comments of his history with Steve, you're viewing him as intentionally pumping up his own story. The truth is he's trying very hard to be honest with the listener as to his comings and goings with Apple and…

Yeah, but here's the only sentence that really talks about "what it's like working with Steve":

"Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. "

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#115

Post by i_am_andy »

veemjeem wrote: post #16
xd wrote: post #3

"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 think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out…

Surely not 3.5" floppies in 1998. 1998 was the year of 100MB zip disks, LS120 supper floppies. This was when everyone already had CD-roms in their PCs and some luck people had CD-writers.

I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#116

Post by cstross »

veemjeem wrote: post #16
xd wrote: post #3

"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 think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out…

Around 1996-97 Apple sold a digital camera, the QuickCam (and then, IIRC, the QuickCam 500). Steve killed the line when he came back, and (as someone who had access to one at work) all I can say is "good riddance".

The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a fixed-focus device with secondary viewfinder glass, no on-board LCD display, and it weighed about 0.5Kg (one of your old-school pounds). It was mostly marketed at estate agents and other professions who needed to snap shots and upload them to a computer frequently; as a consumer device it was a bit crap -- twice the cost of a cheap photo-film SLR and vastly inferior quality.

What made digital cameras practical was cheap expandability (remember when a 16Mb CF card was expensive and bleeding edge?) and digital viewfinder backs. Which didn't really arrive at a consumer-friendly price point until 1999-2000 (I remember paying £700 for a 1.4 megapixel camera with a digital viewfinder circa 1999-ish).

Which in turn tells us why iPhoto didn't come along until the turn of the millennium ...

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#117

Post by DanBC »

i_am_andy wrote: post #115
veemjeem wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out…

Surely not 3.5" floppies in 1998. 1998 was the year of 100MB zip disks, LS120 supper floppies. This was when everyone already had CD-roms in their PCs and some luck people had CD-writers. I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica)

> Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997), the first digital camera of the Mavica series.

> The later Digital Mavicas recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market.

[...]

> and a new CD Mavica series — which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#118

Post by Tichy »

xd wrote: post #3

"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?

Absolutely! I remember the date because I was living in London and I wondered how to get a digital camera, which was still quite expensive and of course also crappy. It was also the time of GeoCities.

Once I had my first digital camera I immediately amassed thousands of photos, and I didn't have a Mac.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#119

Post by Tichy »

veemjeem wrote: post #17
plunchete wrote: post #7

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.

In the good old days, MP3s were generated by ripping CDs or copying from other people's computers during LAN parties.

Re: What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

#120

Post by yardie »

cstross wrote: post #116
veemjeem wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out…

Around 1996-97 Apple sold a digital camera, the QuickCam (and then, IIRC, the QuickCam 500). Steve killed the line when he came back, and (as someone who had access to one at work) all I can say is "good riddance". The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a…

Apple Quicktake, Logitech QuickCam. I've owned the later and have used both. In retrospect I consider it the early version of instagram. My friends and I would take pictures of ourselves goofing around and upload them to our university webpages or Geocities. All in the same day. The other option was film cameras which could take days or weeks (or years if you lost a canister).
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