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folklore.org, a site maintained by Andy Herzfeld, also has some good tidbits about the rest of the Apple and specifically the Mac team.
Heck, most of the interesting stuff in the Jobs bio was sourced from this site.
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> Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
There is always room for differentiation at the top, either as an architect, or leader - but (speaking of my own profession) - I've never actually seen an environment where any particularly network engineer wasn't replaceable. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a first class network engineer is that they leave behind an environment that is well documented, designed to industry standards, and is pretty much resistant ou…
A great CEO, after he has built a good team and a good strategy can just let the company sailing along for a decade. He is just as fungible as the network engineer. I mean, Jobs died and Apple didn't immediately go bankrupt, another CEO just stepped in, and either cruise along ( or picked up where Jobs left of, future will tell )
The big difference between the 2 is the immediate impact and that's more a cultural thing than anything. If you look at it from an engineering point of view, you avoid at all cost to design anything with such a fragile, expensive and exposed element as is the CEO role in a business the size of Apple.
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>And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? Elon musk?
Top contender, but has a way to go before he achieves near Jobs-level success.
For me, we're still under Jobs' reality distortion field. I mean, which companies did he build? NeXT which did interesting technology but basically died in the market. Pixar where there's significant dispute about his level of involvement and he may have been more an angel investor.
And Apple. Huge, sure. But he was kicked out the first time round for focusing exclusively on a product that was losing money hand over fist, was both more expensive and less capable than rival products, and which was never more than a minor niche player (albeit stably so), squandering the Apple II's early work. When he returned it was some years before they regained serious success, and that was largely with iOS. Which, by the time of his death, was already losing market position in both phones and tablets, a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did, for similar reasons - one manufacturer and a few devices simply can't innovate as fast as a whole army of rivals cooperating. He built great products, but a great company to live for a lifetime?
Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have even 0.1% of Steve Jobs' success. He was a visionary, a brilliant marketer and an excellent communicator. But I'd suggest his personal single-minded obsession interfered with his ability to hear the market reaction to his products, and the consequence of that was not companies that last a lifetime.
"And when Jobs (in the movie, but really a board does this) denied stock to the early garage team (some not even shown) I'm surprised that they chose not to show me giving about $10M of my own stock to them because it was the right thing. And $10M was a lot in that time." Nothing more need be said, really. This is the very definition of character and integrity.
What I want to know is when do we get a movie about Woz?
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Top contender, but has a way to go before he achieves near Jobs-level success.
Hmm, I'd put Jobs lower and Musk higher; I'd suggest we're overscoring Steve Jobs still. Paypal is clearly already a big success though, and both Tesla and SpaceX have the potential to become so in the coming years. For me, we're still under Jobs' reality distortion field. I mean, which companies did he build? NeXT which did interesting technology but basically died in the market. Pixar where there's significant disp…
I'm a Musk fan, but Jobs had a huge body of work in fantastic products/movies that his enterprises created under his leadership.
a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did
There's your problem right there. You're somehow equating number of clone devices out there to Jobs's visionary ability to create entirely new markets with products and services that were then copied endlessly.
Number of cheap clone devices out there produced by third party manufactures was never Jobs' goal. How is IBM doing with that whole computer clone business, by the way?
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What I want to know is when do we get a movie about Woz?
Can we all demand a Woz movie?
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Jobs was more than a "shrewd businessman". Building Pixar over 10 years into one of the top movie studios was not some "shrewd" business decision. Ditto for NeXT, the early Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.. It's more accurate to say he was a visionary who took a long term view. It's only in retrospect that we have the luxury of looking on his track record as smart from a business standpoint. Woz even criticizes t…
I wasn't making any particular assertion about what Jobs was. Call him a businessman, call him a visionary, call him whatever you like. Unfortunately, no matter what I call him, someone will object.
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Jobs is a designer. Using existing pieces to create a good product. While this is an important skill to have, it is nothing I would idolize someone for, moreover, Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing (and really awesome hacking). This is _division of labor_. You just cannot build products alone. While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too o…
"Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing" As an EE-type dude Woz's design work was pretty impressive. He's in no danger of being worshipped like a Williams, Pease, or Widlar (much less a Tesla) but he's at most only one tier down. Lets say he's in the top ten, or in serious competition to be in that class. Multiple independent people repeatedly come up with the phrase…
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Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
> But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness. Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
The lesson in all this is that when you are mass-marketing a story to the public, the truth doesn't sell as well as a greatly altered version of the truth. People want to see a romanticized version of the story, so that is what Hollywood gives them. There shouldn't really be a huge surprise there. If you really want to know what factual events took place in any story, you're probably going to have to do a lot better than a two-hour Hollywood interpretation starring the lead character from Two and a Half Men.