Could someone mention the context for the question? I have seen this clip before and it always escapes me.
Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
161–170 of 173 posts
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#162...if you think about it, it's the phrase "sell 8 billion dollars of product a year" that does the heavylifting, where he sets up the overall tone as "Me: Successful business tycoon. You: Angry nobody." It would come across as less arrogant, if he had just resisted the temptation to say that at all. He probably realizes that himself as he speaks and then wraps it into a humblebrag when he says "And I've made this mis…
This is the crux of the argument, however arrogant it might sound. Brilliant genius engineer guy with shiny thing needs to be able to articulate how to sell $8B of the thing. This of course has not happened, as OpenDoc had been failing for years until that point. That statement is the final blow. And probably deserved by a person who just accused their boss in public of being uneducated on the topic. Something elitis…
I don't know enough about the specifics of the OpenDoc thing to be able to comment on that.
I also don't know enough about the specifics of what happened to that guy. Was he an Apple engineer? Do we know whether he got fired the next day? If not, we don't really know whether he got away with anything at all, do we?
The morals of angrily accusing your boss of something in public take a bit of unpacking. In my experience, bosses throw angry accusations at their subordinates much more frequently than the other way around. In fact, many bosses seem to think it's their job description. And they get away with it pretty much all the time (again: my experience).
Why should the social norms that govern a boss's behaviour towards their subordinates differ so radically from those that govern subordinates' behaviour towards their bosses? I mean: If this is the Prussian army in the 19th century, I kind of get it. But if those are highly educated professionals working on a common cause like Apple and we're in California in 1997, then this asymmetry doesn't sit with me as easily. Any tech company that I would want to work for would have to be basically pretty egalitarian.
Even though I know nothing about the specifics of the situation, I can sort of empathise with the overall theme: Imagine you're an "individual contributor" who takes shit from their bosses all day long, and the higher-ups just thanked you for it by flushing your career down the tube when they decided to cancel some project or some commitment or something that was deeply important to you. You go home and tell your wife, and she thinks you're a f#ing loser to put yourself in a situation where they can just treat you like that. You aren't even doing anything (because: What can you do?) to stand up for yourself. You have a difficult time looking yourself in the mirror. Then some public event like this comes along, and it may be the only chance you'll ever have to directly interact with that CEO. If you air your grievance and show them how angry you are, it may well help you, psychologically. You may or may not have a job the next day, but, if you don't, then, at least in your own mind, you died an "honorable" martyr's death. Even though I've never done anything like that (and probably wouldn't), I can sort of relate to that.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't stretch as far as calling Musk a genius - he's someone with a lot of business acumen, and understands how to use social media effectively to get what he wants (much like Trump), and has deep connections to make his ventures successful. SpaceX, Tesla etc would not be where they are now without all the funding Musk was able to secure and source from governments (grants, tax breaks, investments etc), and then…
If you haven't heard Musk talk IN DEPTH about rocketry, rocket engines, etc, then you should definitely watch the videos (linked below). For all his flaws (which are many), Musk does really understand his companies to a depth I've never before seen with a CEO. I've worked with many VPs and Executive team folk and I've never met someone that can have such low-level discussions about how their tech works, the product d…
its such ridiculous grading on a curve. dan gelbart is an example of a billionaire ceo who shows a genuine mastery of machining fabrication and protyping. just watch him on youtube. musk is such a dilletante by comparison. his primary skill is as a financier.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Jobs' answer technically a non-sequitur rebuttal to a technical question? Only that charisma has "carried the motion" through
But it wasn't a sincere question; It was a statement disguised as a question in order to fit the format of the live Q&A, and the statement was "I think discontinuing OpenDoc makes you dumb and I want to humiliate you publicly for it".
> "I think discontinuing OpenDoc makes you dumb and I want to humiliate you publicly for it"
Wasn't it more like 'by discontinuing OpenDoc, you're throwing good work that I and others poured ourselves into for years, and reveal that your agreements to support it were made in bad faith. I'm calling you out for abandoning our team, you bastard'?
imo the sentiment is clearly one of indignation and hurt at perceived betrayal and dishonesty, not really intellectual superiority
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? I don't understand the dude's question on a technical level.
To my mind it’s a bit of a trick question intended to bait Jobs into comparing apples to oranges. OpenDoc’s goal seems to be something of an early fediverse (shoot me if you disagree): a component framework that would allow applications to aggregate/compose/edit/display documents or subfragments thereof simultaneously from a federated network of sources, in an open standard that would allow anybody to roll their own…
Fediverse?? I don't think so. OpenDoc is just a standard for creating documents with dynamic content. A competitor to OLEII. Basically covers a lot of what pdfs do, but can also be used to build basic apps.
Jobs fires the entire OpenDoc team and then goes off on a tangent on how java (a completely different thing - a virtual machine based programming language) will replace it. Perhaps Jobs was referring to NetBeans? In any case, the engineer was right to be pissed. Apple (and maybe Jobs) had spent years pulling devs onto their OpenDoc standard, then kill it abruptly effectively killing app developers overnight with a handwaving technically ignorant explanation on how Java could replace it.
Interestingly, years later Microsoft has killed OLE II, Oracle killed NetBeans, and we all moved to WebApps/JavaScript shit (yet somehow PDFs are still ubiquitous) so perhaps Jobs was right on a business level, but this is an example of his reality distortion field in effect.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
To my mind it’s a bit of a trick question intended to bait Jobs into comparing apples to oranges. OpenDoc’s goal seems to be something of an early fediverse (shoot me if you disagree): a component framework that would allow applications to aggregate/compose/edit/display documents or subfragments thereof simultaneously from a federated network of sources, in an open standard that would allow anybody to roll their own…
Fediverse?? I don't think so. OpenDoc is just a standard for creating documents with dynamic content. A competitor to OLEII. Basically covers a lot of what pdfs do, but can also be used to build basic apps. Jobs fires the entire OpenDoc team and then goes off on a tangent on how java (a completely different thing - a virtual machine based programming language) will replace it. Perhaps Jobs was referring to NetBeans?…
Yeah but werent the files fragmentable across networks in an open standard that anybody can roll a UI for?
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
It solves a problem that you don't realize is here yet, just like people in France didn't understand it was here yet and Rome and Weimar Germany... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignat https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
It doesn’t solve anything. Currency used to be backed by gold. There was always a fallback value of currency in the form of gold. Crypto falls back on the US dollar. If the US dollar collapses. As too does Bitcoin. And there is nothing in place to prevent this.
Crypto is in no way backed by the dollar. That would imply you could always trade Crypto for some minimum number of dollars after a crash. But as has been demonstrated repeatedly coins can and go to 0$.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t solve anything. Currency used to be backed by gold. There was always a fallback value of currency in the form of gold. Crypto falls back on the US dollar. If the US dollar collapses. As too does Bitcoin. And there is nothing in place to prevent this.
Crypto is in no way backed by the dollar. That would imply you could always trade Crypto for some minimum number of dollars after a crash. But as has been demonstrated repeatedly coins can and go to 0$.
Sure, coins can crash and turn to dust. But it doesn't change the fact its value is determined by the dollar. If the dollar crashes, bitcoin has 0 value. No one buys and sells in bitcoin so bitcoin has no real value at the end of the day. It solves no problem.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto is in no way backed by the dollar. That would imply you could always trade Crypto for some minimum number of dollars after a crash. But as has been demonstrated repeatedly coins can and go to 0$.
Sure, coins can crash and turn to dust. But it doesn't change the fact its value is determined by the dollar. If the dollar crashes, bitcoin has 0 value. No one buys and sells in bitcoin so bitcoin has no real value at the end of the day. It solves no problem.
People buy and sell crypto in other currencies. It’s possible for the dollar to crash without destroying crypto, though it seems unlikely for the dollar to crash without severe global issues that would likely take down crypto as well.
Re: Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Apple products and have since childhood, and I have little doubt Jobs’ personality, thinking, and talent, are major factors in what I liked about Apple then and do now. And I detest Musk. That disclosure out of the way… Jobs was notoriously quick to anger, imperious in his internal role, very selectively rational, and generally… well, often kind of a jerk. I know all of that can overlap with coherence and pers…
The one where Gassee disses him for bad behavior is funny; wonder if it really happened. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped.txt
Gassée was always quick with a burn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lie3C2kjCjo