back to article A good time Woz had by all: We peeked our head into Primary Data and this is what we saw

Picture this. A little press conference with Primary Data at its headquarters in Los Altos, California, right in the armpit of Silicon Valley. CEO Lance Smith is briskly burbling away about his company, but us hacks are somewhat distracted. The Apple wizard that was, Steve Wozniak, Stephen Gary Wozniak, age 66, is sitting …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    I try, I really do

    Another day, another storage startup. Time was when I used to get all excited about WAFL and Celerra and ZFS and ..., but these days it all seems so...1990s. And yet, all so future tense as well. Can we get some real case studies of significant-sized enterprises with hard storage problems using technology from X or Y to do business better? Until then, I'm hitting the snooze button.

  2. Tim99 Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    CEO - Lance Smith

    The supplied picture looks as though he might have just inhaled Bolivian marching powder. I suppose that ensures that at least one person is awake at the end of the press conference.

    Obviously, Paris has never done that >>====================>

  3. wolfetone Silver badge

    Exsqueeze me

    But Woz has done alot more than just the Apple 2.

    He made the original Apple.

    He invented the universal remote control (or worked on it, my recollection on that is sketchy).

    And he wrote the 2nd best autobiography I've ever read - beaten only by Perry McCarthy's "Flat Out, Flat Broke". For the unwashed, McCarthy was the original Stig in the Top Gear, the Black one that drove off an aircraft carrier.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    So it does what was hidden in the bowels of an AS400 with users data?

    But is open source and multiple level.

    Can it support tape?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wozniak in waffle mode

    The Hive - Steve Wozniak, Dave Hitz & Lance Smith

    11:41: Wozniak: Well you know what, when we started Apple, we didn't exactly have the culture of a big company. But we felt, the few of us that were there, it was important to hire professional people who knew what they were doing, not to remain just a couple of kids. And we also had this feeling that we were on top of a revolution, we had a great product. It was going to be the seeds of making something important in the world. So for the next two years almost nobody ever left. I mean we felt we were something important in the world. And I don't know if that's the culture that remains today but I'm sure it's a big seed of it ..

    17:39 Wozniak: .. the communication between sales and marketing is sometimes a problem too within a company. But when I joined Fusion‑IO and I had one year where I was in my office everyday. I went on every sales call I could. I wanted to hear what the customers wanted ..

    19:12 Wozniak: But Apple made a lot of mistakes too putting out products like, ten years too early, five years too early. If you miss the timing because of the price and the value, that can hurt you too ..

    19:37 Wozniak: Even as an engineer, all my life was getting good at reducing the complexity, reducing the size, reducing the cost. Because I had no money. Having no money and not having done it before were the two greatest thing I ever did ..

    20:17 Wozniak: First of all you gotta have some engineering and talent that knows how to built it. And you should not conceive your product thinking then I'll go and get the engineering once I have the idea. The idea and some knowledge of building parts and what can't be made. People who have spent their life as makers, completing, really developing working prototypes and models of things, should be included in the starting team and you gotta have customer support. Somebody on your starting team is a customer. That absolutely lived there and knows what they want, what's good and what's bad and they also gotta have some good thinking. They can't have been just there, they gotta be like a person who really wants things to be right and not wrong. And not anything works anything is good, no. And I think you need those three people, they could all be in one person, or they could be two people or three, but you really need that in a founding team ...

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