Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And $10M was a lot in that time." I love this. Classic Steve Wozniak humor.
Waz was the 1% before it was cool.
before it wasn't cool.
Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
261–270 of 314 posts
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#262Earlier 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…
> Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable…
"I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..."
I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#263Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't totally disagree, but I think this is excessively sunny. As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and goi…
Fortunately for us, Apple acquiring NeXT instead of Be means that we get to program iOS and OS X in Objective-C instead of C++.
There's a lot of things to say against Objective-C, as far as I know.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we all demand a Woz movie?
http://www.kickstarter.com/
I've never backed anything on Kickstarter yet, nothing's caught my eye, but an iWoz film would be a great way to get into the whole crowdfunding thing.
He's a great engineer, but unfortunately for big-budget film-makers, isn't a name that'll draw people into the box office.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Paypal is interesting and a niche success, but wasn't deeply visionary. SpaceX and Tesla are cool, and may even end up being market successes - but they still have a ways to go before proving themselves. 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 mu…
Paypal was much more than a niche success - "payments on the internet" is huge. You can argue Paypal didn't materialize its vision, but the vision was there.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#267"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?
Not a movie but there's more about Woz in here than anyone else...
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company. It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable…
"I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..." I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.
I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response.
To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties.
If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I don't totally disagree, but I think this is excessively sunny. As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and goi…
I agree about the iPod, before that Apple was a sad story. They just rebranded the Diamond PMP for the Napster crowd, which was pretty smart. Nobody knew what an MP3 player was till Napster came along:
Diamond Rio MP3 player - 1998
Napster - 1999
iPod - 2001
After that, everything they made was a minimal white box with rounded corners and the rest is history. LOL.
Re: Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wrote a book called iWoz. It's definitely worth a read if you're interested in him. He was obsessed with building his own computer from a young age.
I read that book and while I can recommend it, I felt Woz didn't dwell particularly long on any single aspect - it was just a nice long polished story, like something he had told many times before but this time collected into a book. I don't think I was looking for secrets or drama, but the man has done some amazing things and he puts so little emphasis on them in the book. Does a Wozniak biography exist that is not…
http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers
Not sure how much it has changed (revisions) but my old copy has a few chapters on Woz.