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Think different about Jobs

james.cridland.net

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Re: Think different about Jobs

#121

Post by unalone »

roflharrison wrote: post #116
analyk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful about generalizing "Android". The latest open source version of Android was released in December 2010. Many Android phones cannot be rooted without exploits.

Off topic but too tempting: It is safe to generalize that Android (why the quotes?) is open. There is continual activity on the Android source tree with updates for most versions of the platform well after December last year. The well publicised exclusion is Honeycomb and we can only speculate why Google kept that one to themselves (incomplete/Kindle Fire depending on your Android hate level). Even if you insist that…

Forgive me if this is an unfair line of argument, but I've read a number of articles this month about how quickly Android phones become ineligible for an OS upgrade, because so many Android phones mean carriers can push the latest OS only to their most recent phones. Compare that to the closed system of iOS, where only one brand of phone uses the system, yet the 2.5-year-old 3Gs just got the upgrade to iOS 5.

Android is certainly more open than iOS in many aspects, yet that openness does not always lead to freedom for its users.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#122

Post by unalone »

ethank wrote: post #109
5hoom wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. There was barely an indie developer scene for mobile before the iphone.

I had worked for a company that spent 1 million dollars to make a J2ME game. It never even came out.

Ooh. Is this a story you can tell? I'd like to hear more about this.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#123

Post by ahoyhere »

andrewcooke wrote: post #43
sjs wrote: post #31

I hope he also avoids products and media made my anyone who has not been an absolute saint their entire life. It's perfectly acceptable to dislike Jobs, no question about that whatsoever. It's also acceptable to stop buying Apple stuff for any reason. But if you're going to put a proverbial line in the sand on moral grounds then you had better stick to your guns and apply that to everything or you just end up looking…

you really think that "anyone who has not been an absolute saint their entire life" is a equivalent to "Devoid of any kind of feelings towards anyone else, he shouts, screams, cries and sulks his way through his petulant life"? because i don't. i think there's quite a difference. everyone can be an arsehole sometimes, sure. but that doesn't excuse those that are consistently unpleasant. there's a clear difference. so…

Nobody who's actually read anything written by Jobs, or read any number of excerpts from interviews, etc., could believe that he is what you are describing.

Case in point: his Stanford commencement speech.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Most brilliant people are hard to work with -- look at Edison, or hell, Mother Theresa. She was famously horrible and designed a system that actually created suffering.

Jobs hurt a few people's feelings because he screamed at them. And yet he obviously thought deeply about love and life, and cared for his family and close friends.

Boo fucking hoo.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#124

Post by unalone »

jronkone wrote: post #111
ryan-allen wrote: post #9

While you can point at how he conducted himself at Apple and scream "Monster!", what isn't mentioned in this post but is dealt with at length in his biography is how he conducted himself at Pixar. He was much more low-key about the 'products' at Pixar, he mostly was an enabler and negotiator for them. In Pixar's early days he invested an awful lot of his then-fortune into keeping it alive, and it was his cunning nego…

> The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost. The true costs of these peoples' behavior is never on themselves.

I think you make a good point. People who are so convinced of their own rightness frequently turn into destructive monsters. But I also think that there's a difference between standing up for your convictions by insisting that people make a product right and standing up for your convictions by inflicting active harm on people.

The people of Apple could have quit. Many of them did. I suspect that the ones who remained felt the trade-off was acceptable. And Jobs didn't use his power to pursue people and inflict pain on them, so his dictatorial process had very clear limits.

When you're trying to realize a vision, compromise ruins everything. That said, not all visions deserve to be realized, and sometimes compromise avoids a lot of hurt. Jobs's hurt was not especially severe, and his vision was astonishing, so in his specific case I think it was justified; that ruling doesn't extend to everybody else who wants to push relentlessly towards a goal, because many goals are horrible and many pushes are just as bad.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#125

Post by ahoyhere »

unalone wrote: post #119
kiba wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't really care about how good Apple products are or how innovative are. I don't use them, I don't hate them either. It's just not for me. My beef with apple is how they felt entitled to control the devices that apple made but consumers own, making them unhackable. When I buy something, I own it, period. I should be able to reverse engineer anything on the market, because I obtained the copy. I don't gi…

> But, if Apple win the mobile war, we are screwed as far as freedom and ownership is concerned. Sentences like this are why the phrase "mobile war" should be taken away from all of us and placed on the high shelf next to the cookie jar. "Mobile war" is an exciting idea – much more exciting than "competitive mobile marketplace" – and so we like to think in these terms despite how misleading they are. There is no mobi…

> You have your Android phone! Why must you wish misfortune on my choice?

Because people like this are hypocrites… they want to take your choice away, and scream and fight and claw madly if they don't get their choice.

Mentally, these people are still children. They look at everything (e.g. alll of business) as it if it is a zero-sum game. They take everything personally.

It's hard not to be offended when you think a phone OS is tied intimately to who you are. Sad, but true.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#126

Post by unalone »

Apocryphon wrote: post #97
wallawe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex. 1: People would go the length of the world making sure that they accomplished every minute detail of what he had asked to perfection. Had he not been such a hardass and callous type person, I highly doubt things would have been done in the time frames and to the scope that he required. It's the tragedy of success in his circumstance. Take the bad with the good.

He could have done that without screwing over Wozniak. He could have been a perfectionist without acting petulant.

He could have. Those were character flaws that he may have been better without. Perhaps if he'd lived another 20 years he'd have outgrown his petulance.

Then again, maybe not. Petulance isn't the worst thing a person can be. If that's the character flaw somebody clings to in their old age, they're probably not entirely bad. Screwing over Woz was much worse, but he was in his twenties, and twentysomethings barely count as human beings. (I say this as a twentysomething myself.)

Re: Think different about Jobs

#127

Post by ahoyhere »

exit wrote: post #107
ryan-allen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on). Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year.…

there were 18 attempted suicides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides those suicides were still associated with work conditions at foxconn, regardless of whether the suicide is higher in the general population.

Why should suicide attempts count? They can't be compared to the rate in the general public -- most suicide attempts don't succeed. More importantly, even if you did count them as successful, there'd need to be another 119 suicides for Foxconn employees to be up to the general population's rate of suicide.

That means, conservatively, that people who work at Foxconn are 7x LESS likely to commit suicide than in the general population.

11x LESS likely if you don't do intellectually dishonest things as counting attempts as successful suicides.

People also kill themselves over Tamagotchis. Suicidal people find a reason. So unless there's actually evidence of a higher-than-normal rate of suicide, the whole line of argument is a red herring.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#128

Post by imathrowaway123 »

ryan-allen wrote: post #9

While you can point at how he conducted himself at Apple and scream "Monster!", what isn't mentioned in this post but is dealt with at length in his biography is how he conducted himself at Pixar. He was much more low-key about the 'products' at Pixar, he mostly was an enabler and negotiator for them. In Pixar's early days he invested an awful lot of his then-fortune into keeping it alive, and it was his cunning nego…

Hear hear. You make a point that is true as the day is long - one which nobody wants to hear.

Not long ago I became a boss and tried to be a textbook good one: paying generously, being generous in general (e.g. vacation/sick days on the honor system), being a real sweetheart, asking nicely, giving credit, supporting their initiatives, giving control… My employees were smart, capable, and hard-working, so I should trust them. So I thought.

I ended up having to fire all of them.

When they freelanced for me before I hired them, they were on the ball and contributing. Then I made the mistake of hiring them and it all went to shit. They were not contributing anything like the kind of value I paid them for, wasting my time & money, generally spoiled, ungrateful, and clearly contemptuous of me and what I asked of them, never considering my position as the person responsible for their salaries and keeping the company alive.

Somehow I accidentally led them to believe that they were "partners" in decision-making, even though they had none of the risk. Not that they acted like partners, of course. But they came away with the idea that it was "our" business, and proceeded to do jack all with it except act entitled.

And when I fired them, they were shocked. They apparently spent quite a lot of time bitching about me to other people (while not doing their jobs) but were caught completely unawares that the feeling went both ways. Shocking.

I certainly have learned a valuable lesson:

When you're a driven, exacting person, you have to either hope you will find somebody just like you (fat chance!!) -- or you have to make them. And the making of a driven, exacting person from the outside is never going to be pleasant for the one being made. (And no matter how much better it makes them, they will whine about it.)

What are the chances that the "beleaguered" employees Jobs upset would have done work half as good without a cruel taskmaster? Pretty low, based on my experience.

Me, I have to admire somebody who can keep the pressure on another person and force them to do great work. I don't have it in me.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#129

Post by ahoyhere »

nirvana wrote: post #63

Isaacson's book is a hatchet job, with many errors, and some downright dishonest statements. It is a shame that Jobs cooperated with that hack. In numerous passages, Isaacson will quote Jobs saying something perfectly truthful[1], and then follow it up with a claim that Jobs is lying. Most of the time, he doesn't provide any evidence that Jobs is lying, just the assertion, because, as Isaacson is careful to tell us m…

Thanks for taking the time to write all this up. I haven't delved into my copy yet, but it's great that now I can do so knowing that I shouldn't trust Isaacson's editorializing.

I joined Hacker News a long time ago. I think it's shameful that people here now don't know any better -- or don't have the brains -- than to say that it doesn't matter if the book is full of bald-faced lies, because Steve Jobs was not a nice man, or because the iPhone isn't "open."

What a load of brainless boloney.

In the old HN, this post of yours would have triggered an interesting discussion about other lies found in the book, and/or stories & facts (real ones) omitted, and/or the perils of biography in general.

So, just so you know, some of us old guard are still here, appreciating what you're doing.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#130

Post by matwood »

kiba wrote: post #81
nirvana wrote: post #63

Isaacson's book is a hatchet job, with many errors, and some downright dishonest statements. It is a shame that Jobs cooperated with that hack. In numerous passages, Isaacson will quote Jobs saying something perfectly truthful[1], and then follow it up with a claim that Jobs is lying. Most of the time, he doesn't provide any evidence that Jobs is lying, just the assertion, because, as Isaacson is careful to tell us m…

Honestly, I don't really care about how good Apple products are or how innovative are. I don't use them, I don't hate them either. It's just not for me. My beef with apple is how they felt entitled to control the devices that apple made but consumers own, making them unhackable. When I buy something, I own it, period. I should be able to reverse engineer anything on the market, because I obtained the copy. I don't gi…

Somebody can alway polish their own android version and make it like the magical apple products that I hear so much about.

I hate the 'apple makes most of the profits' line that gets talked about all the time (even though true), but if what you say is really so easy then why hasn't someone or some company done it?

Things is, it's not easy. This is where techies (myself included) often miss there is something beyond a feature list. How those features are combined into a package becomes more like art than another math problem to solve. And like art, it is very hard to create, but easy to notice when it is done right. From what I have seen to date, Apple gets the art part right much more often than the Android phones.

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