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There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

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Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#161

Post by guru4consulting »

chairmansteve wrote: post #68
omnimus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.

You are right. But the real world is a messy place. Good people do bad things and vice versa. Not many people are entirely good or entirely bad. HN is a very strong net positive IMO. YC could easily monetize it into oblivion. They don't.

They do not monetize but may do probably something worse, infotize or narratize (just invented words). By using an almost neutral, altruistic platform to subtly control/constrain the narratives on certain tech overlords. As much as I love HN, I do not agree with their reasoning to flag some of the posts that are negative to the tech elites.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#162

Post by fmlpp »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #140
postalcoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.

I just watched a Ken Thompson interview when he's 80 years old. My god jolly, I feel like Ken's the person you might be referring to. Wozniak is great as well. Perhaps we (or people?) might affiliate him more with Hackernews given he was co-founder of a company which many founders within HN might want to achieve (or replicate?) But the other way I view HN is a place of curiosity, a place of tinkering. I saw the inter…

Agree

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#163

Post by snek_case »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #74
microtherion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.

You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.

Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).

The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#164

Post by snek_case »

dhosek wrote: post #94
rsanek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his net worth is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-h...

Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.

3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#165

Post by microtherion »

snek_case wrote: post #163
fuzzfactor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.

Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible fo…

As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.

But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#166

Post by dhosek »

snek_case wrote: post #164
dhosek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.

3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.

I wasn’t talking about a withdrawal rate, this is a rate of return and just living on the interest.
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