Brilliant interview with Woz (1984) - shows how sharp this man is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RZrv55B6Js
Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
221–230 of 314 posts
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought iWoz was bittersweet, even cautionary. Here's this brilliant guy doing unbelievable work, then after he makes it he's just spending his time figuring out what to do with the money ... and he designs a new remote so he can watch TV better.
It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz. Steve moved on to actively search for, find and collaborate with as many people like Woz as he could. Unfortunately for us Woz never moved on, but then maybe he did what he needed to do.
> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs
Nope. Woz gives every impression that he'd be perfectly happy inventing stuff, rich or not. He doesn't really need a Steve Jobs, and the exploitation by someone who presented himself as a friend mostly seems to have caused him a lot of heartache.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#223It makes you wonder how wrong other movie biographies are.
You will never get all the detail right about someone's life; the best you can hope for is to focus on a slice and the the spirit right. Nikki Lauda is pretty happy with Rush, as an example of something done pretty well, but it deliberately confined itself to a little background and a year in Lauda and Hunt's lives.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#224"Woz" would be a better title for a movie than "Jobs" anyway
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#225"Woz" would be a better title for a movie than "Jobs" anyway
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#226"Woz" would be a better title for a movie than "Jobs" anyway.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
I think in the end it sounds like they both had very different skill sets.
Woz seems in his comment and from comments in this topic to have wonderful integrity, and empathy. He builds cool things because he can and because he wants to help others. He had incredible intellectual power and expertise in a newly developing field and worked in almost all aspects of it.
Jobs on the other hand had an incredible business sense. He lacked the empathy that Woz had but had the drive which actually put certain products out to market where they reached millions and millions of people.
I think this is very much a case of comparing apples to oranges.
Who would you rather hang out with and have as your lead engineer? Woz. Of course. No brainer.
Who would you rather have as your lead business man, innovator, and idea man? Jobs. No brainer.
Are there things both can probably be faulted for? Sure. Are there things that both can be idolized for? Sure. You don't have to idolize an entirety of a person. Just like no one things you idolize wife beaters for liking Rick James music, or idolize pedophiles for liking Michael Jacksons. The list of people who've done incredible things but had terrible sides to them is tremendous. And the list of terrible things is incredibly subjective in a lot of cases. Is being an asshole manager who accomplishes amazing things a bad thing? Yes to some and no to others. It's a very gray area I believe.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#228"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.
10M might be more than I make in my lifetime
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#229Has this link gathered the most number of upvotes ever on HN already? :) (How can we find that out? https://news.ycombinator.com/best clearly shows it way above, but I guess it doesn't show the links of 'all times')
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> A genius grade stuffed suit gets all the credit. A genius grade designer is a mere plumber to be used as a resource by the really important person, that being the stuffed suit.
I don't think that's a general rule though, compare Tim Cook and Jony Ive. (Maybe I'm reading too much MacRumors for my own good, though...)