Steve Jobs

golden_blunder

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been reading his biography recently, absolutely fascinating character.

Seemed a bit of an asshole but very good at driving through what he felt was technology advances with the first Mac's, the iPhone, the iPad, not to mention his work with building Pixar

very odd character though, for example trying to beat cancer by dieting
 
I agree that he was an absolutely fascinating person. As someone who (at least liked to think) that I was well up on my Steve Jobs knowledge - this book completely changed that for me.

You are right about his seemingly uncanny ability to motivate, as well as his ability to make very talented people achieve what would elsewhere be considered 'impossible', in 'impossible' time frames.

I don't think that there has ever really been a debate on whether Jobs was a pioneer or a genius. However, more than anything (for me) the book does a fantastic job of portraying exactly why he was considered those things.

I've always followed the career of Jobs and Apple as a company as my father was a hardcore Mac user. (I still have an Apple 2e and the first Macbook). My first memory of Jobs was as a kid watching a TV movie called "Pirates of Silicon Valley". I was hooked after that.

I won't go into any spoilers for those who want to read it, but one thing that really stood out for me in the book was the dynamic between Gates and Jobs. They are / were complete opposites by the very definition of the word yet the industry brought them together.
 
Absolutely loved the book, fascinating person and like kelvinkato I wont go into anything specific as I dont want to mention any spoilers however the level of attention to detail he had was incredible. I loved the notion he had of you had either done something great or something shit. When someone showed him something it would be the best thing ever or a piece of crap. There was no middle ground at all with him, it was either be the best or go home.

The bit where he was working on the first macintosh I loved, reading about how he was pushing that team to do and achieve things they did not think was possible to do.
 
I shouldn't have, considering he was seriously ill, but i laughed at the bit when he was in hospital and started complaining about the oxygen masks not being designed well
 
I think he had a bit of a God complex myself.

Thought he could beat it by positive thought and that he'd beat the odds through alternative remedies.

He'd have probably survived longer if he'd accepted the need for conventional treatment sooner too.
 
golden_blunder said:
I shouldn't have, considering he was seriously ill, but i laughed at the bit when he was in hospital and started complaining about the oxygen masks not being designed well
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I laughed at that bit too tbh, also that thing they put on your finger to read vital signs such as oxygen saturation and pulse. He moaned about the design of that too
 
iSparky said:
The bit where he was working on the first macintosh I loved, reading about how he was pushing that team to do and achieve things they did not think was possible to do.
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Yet the Amiga 1000 totally blew it out of the water in every department (hardware and software/OS) and at less than half the price. Yeah, Steve Jobs really pushed them to achieve the impossible, so much so that they got technically pwned.

Nothing to be ashamed of, the Amiga blew everything out of the water on a technical level, but for the book to say that about him pushing for them to do things not thought possible is a joke. A 512 x 342 monochrome display... really?
 
golden_blunder said:
Seemed a bit of an asshole but very good at driving through what he felt was technology advances with the first Mac's
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The LISA was the high end machine at the time (still couldn't compete with an Amiga), and he was removed from that project in favour of the Mac. The later Macintosh XL I think was basically a LISA. Macintosh wasn't technically advanced in any area, even the Atari ST outdid it on that level.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Yet the Amiga 1000 totally blew it out of the water in every department (hardware and software/OS) and at less than half the price. Yeah, Steve Jobs really pushed them to achieve the impossible, so much so that they got technically pwned.

Nothing to be ashamed of, the Amiga blew everything out of the water on a technical level, but for the book to say that about him pushing for them to do things not thought possible is a joke. A 512 x 342 monochrome display... really?
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Have you read the book? I dont mean to sound condescending but we are not talking about the macintosh beating any other machine. Nobody said that it was better than amiga, nobody here said it was the best machine around.

We are talking about the way he inspired and motivated them to do things that they themselves did not think were possible, many people said he had this reality distortion field around him where he could convince people to go and do things that they themselves thought they could not do. That was the so called magic of steve jobs at the time and from then on to his death.

I have no doubt that the amiga was better, hell weaste you would be clued up on that more than I am and I trust you 100% on that but we mean that given the budget he had to work with and the team he had at his disposal the macintosh was without a doubt the second rated machine in the company and they turned it into their top seller.

yes he was pulled from the LISA project, he admitted himself that the abrasive nature of his work and the fact that people found it so hard to work for him meant he was bumped down the pecking order and the board failed to side with him over sully but everyone at the time of working with him even those who hated him all say the same thing about how steve jobs had an insane ability in being able to push people beyond what they thought they could do and in the book the chapter on the macintosh shows that clearly through accounts of people who were there on the team with him at the time.
 
Here's you visionary Geebs (top left red box)...

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That's part of an interview with the lead Amiga designer Jay Miner.

Amiga 1000 could do a display something similar to video output of 448x384 in 32/64 colours or 896x384 in 16 colours (896x768 if interlaced) if HAM was never invoked. Text in the red box on the right refers to the 2nd generation of Amiga developed at Amiga Corp. in Los Gatos (the company that Commodore bought and Jobs couldn't be arsed with) where in late 1987 they had a 1024x1024 non-interlaced display in 128 colours. Commmodore never used that Amiga revision, it had the codename of Amiga Ranger.

So, when Jobs visited Amiga Corp. when they were looking for money, he preferred his 512 x 342, monochrome, low memory, non-expandable, non-multi-tasking Macintosh. I don't blame him, Apple had no real means to fab the custom silicon. Commodore, owning MOS, did and then fecked it all up, but the entire point I was trying to make is what iSparky paraphrased is a bit of a joke. The original Mac was a turd of a machine, yet it's now being touted that its mediocre engineers were so focused by the driving influential wonderful management of Steve Jobs that they did things that they didn't think were possible? Yet at the same time, just over the road, a few blokes funded by some dentists with a bit of spare cash technologically blew them out of the water? Sorry, but if that appears in that book, then that book is a turn in itself trying to evangelise the man in some way. As I said, the original Mac, one of the things he did have a hand in, was a turd.
 
iSparky said:
Have you read the book? I dont mean to sound condescending but we are not talking about the macintosh beating any other machine. Nobody said that it was better than amiga, nobody here said it was the best machine around.
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No, and I have no plans on reading it either if it's going along the lines I think it is.

The point is this statement that you made...

he was pushing that team to do and achieve things they did not think was possible to do.
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Could you provide some quotes from the book that suggest that? I'm interested, because as I said, the original Mac was a technological turd. Is it saying that he was pushing them to make a relative turd, or that the Apple engineers at the time were so incompetent that he pushed them to make a firm stool out of diarrhoea? It couldn't even do multi-tasking until OS X. Strangely enough, LISA (the project he was removed from) did do it in some fashion.
 
I worked with a former VP of marketing at Apple during my days in dot com. He told me all sorts of stories about Jobs' legendary tyranical streak. Such as once when he was in an elevator with another Apple employee. Jobs quizzed a random employee who he didn't know on how much his annual salary was. When the answer was not to Jobs' liking, he instructed the employee to go to HR and tell them Jobs said to reduce his salary. There are many more stories like this floating around silicon valley.
 
tbh it mostly talks in comparison to the IBM clones that were the rage at the time, no mention of Amiga. It does mention Atari, but only because Jobs briefly worked for them on the circuit boards for the "breakout" game
 
Raoul said:
I worked with a former VP of marketing at Apple during my days in dot com. He told me all sorts of stories about Jobs' legendary tyranical streak. Such as once when he was in an elevator with another Apple employee. Jobs quizzed a random employee who he didn't know on how much his annual salary was. When the answer was not to Jobs' liking, he instructed the employee to go to HR and tell them Jobs said to reduce his salary. There are many more stories like this floating around silicon valley.
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I dont doubt it. It seems to me he liked to challenge people and those that didn't come back at him he'd dismiss as being not up to it. There are many examples of people shouting back at him in board rooms and him liking that. He believed in debates as opposed to power point presentations. There are also stories of him hiring people that he met in other walks of life. For example he hired a tour guide he met at a music museum. He thought the young lad was so smart in his field that he arranged for him to work on the iTunes team.

I am sure that there are many tales, both good and bad about the man. I'd like to say that its no way to run a business, but then someone can say that look at Apple and Pixar now, and I have no argument about that.

I think he had a good instinct as to what would sell, he seemed very much a hands-on techy/designer. I dont think he was a people manager at all.
 
I've got a mate who keeps pronouncing his name as Steve Jobes. He genuinely thinks he's right. He's not, is he?
 
voland said:
What makes me sad is that Jobs is still considered to be the 'good guy' and Gates to be the evil mastermind. Sad world we live in.
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By who? I know little about the 2 but I've always considered Gates to be a really good person with all the work he does for charity.
 
theres one word for that: jealousy

people dont like Gates because he built an empire with Microsoft

Yet, they still buy his products
 
Weaste, I love you.

Apart from agreeing with every word Weaste posted above, I'd say that Jobs' lasting legacy is in the field of business and the rather more nebulous 'field' of 'imagining what Joe Blogs would want', especially regarding the user interface. That might sound like faint praise, but it's not -- it's bloody hard and worthy of recognition.

Having said that, if we're talking the Apple aesthetics of the last 20 years, step forward Jonathan Ive KBE.
 
golden_blunder said:
theres one word for that: jealousy

people dont like Gates because he built an empire with Microsoft
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That's not the case. It's the fact that he's another person that got wealthy yet was also mediocre in his field. The case with Gates is that he and his company were in the right place at the right time. The IBM PC was never meant to run DOS at all, and then when IBM used it as a supposed stop-gap measure they left the rights to it with Microsoft. The rest they say is history.
 
Weaste, i really think you would find this biography a good read btw

its really interesting to read how many people from the other big players he had interactions with
 
IBM made many many screw ups back then. They really should have had the home computing market sewn up before the others got into it
 
WeasteDevil said:
That's not the case. It's the fact that he's another person that got wealthy yet was also mediocre in his field. The case with Gates is that he and his company were in the right place at the right time. The IBM PC was never meant to run DOS at all, and then when IBM used it as a supposed stop-gap measure they left the rights to it with Microsoft. The rest they say is history.
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its never the best solution that gets popular. If it was, we would be throwing out our betamax VCRs, not the VHS ones, have WebOS phones, and use OS/2.
 
golden_blunder said:
IBM made many many screw ups back then. They really should have had the home computing market sewn up before the others got into it
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The big wigs at IBM at the time never saw the PC project as a big money maker, they never thought that they would sell that many because they couldn't see a reason why anyone would want one in their home. On the business level, they thought that their mainframes and dumb terminals was the future. In a way they might have been right over the long term when you think about cloud computing and something like ChromeOS, even in the gaming space, something like On Live where the horsepower is not in the hands of the user, it's just a relatively dumb terminal.
 
Raoul said:
I worked with a former VP of marketing at Apple during my days in dot com. He told me all sorts of stories about Jobs' legendary tyranical streak. Such as once when he was in an elevator with another Apple employee. Jobs quizzed a random employee who he didn't know on how much his annual salary was. When the answer was not to Jobs' liking, he instructed the employee to go to HR and tell them Jobs said to reduce his salary. There are many more stories like this floating around silicon valley.
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I've heard a few more living closer to Cupertino and a common one among interns is the fact that he would quiz you in the hallway about what you do for the company effectively making you justify your own employment on the spot. You'd be fired if he didn't think your answer was good enough (or were just too nervous to give him a good answer).
 
jveezy said:
I've heard a few more living closer to Cupertino and a common one among interns is the fact that he would quiz you in the hallway about what you do for the company effectively making you justify your own employment on the spot. You'd be fired if he didn't think your answer was good enough (or were just too nervous to give him a good answer).
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Fair fecks to him - i wish people within the public circuit were dealt this way.

Great read - an eccentric character at times
 
jveezy said:
I've heard a few more living closer to Cupertino and a common one among interns is the fact that he would quiz you in the hallway about what you do for the company effectively making you justify your own employment on the spot. You'd be fired if he didn't think your answer was good enough (or were just too nervous to give him a good answer).
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A guy on a power trip then. I read things like that, and my opinion of him diminishes.

The guy was obviously very technically gifted, and fair play to him. But guys that play God in the workplace are a*seholes.
 
WeasteDevil said:
That's not the case. It's the fact that he's another person that got wealthy yet was also mediocre in his field. The case with Gates is that he and his company were in the right place at the right time. The IBM PC was never meant to run DOS at all, and then when IBM used it as a supposed stop-gap measure they left the rights to it with Microsoft. The rest they say is history.
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Fair enough that Gates got so wealthy considering now how he uses that money. He also left people in charge that knew how to do so and stuck with what he knew himself.

Mediocre is a bit of and overstatement surely.
 
If you want a good read, try reading Game Over by David Sheff, fascinating read into the rise of nintendo in the 70's and 80's. It involves Mt St Helens exploding , the Soviet Union and Robert Maxwell. Anyway for all you jobs fanboys, you can now own the action figure.
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