The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs, Part One When sober, F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been devastatingly intelligent, but he got it dead wrong when he wrote "there are no second acts in American lives". Think Elvis, for example. Or lefty sinkerballer Tommy John of the eponymous surgery. Or, for that matter, Grover Cleveland, whose two acts as US president were separated …
A sad loss to the industry, as well as to his family. You don't get characters like that often.
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To those who continue to criticise Jobs... good CEOs aren't _supposed_ to be nice. The only exceptions are edge cases like the John Lewis Partnership. (Well worth researching if you're unfamiliar with this iconic British retailer's unusual history and management structure.)
You need a streak of ruthlessness to do justice to the role of corporate CEO. This inevitably rubs _some_ people up the wrong way, and in a company the size of Apple, that's inevitably going to result in the occasional employee whining about Steve Jobs' "abrasive" personality. Yes, he was a bit mean to people on occasion, but given that Woz was getting endless free plays of his gaming addiction in return, I doubt he was all that annoyed by it. It's not as if Atari were paying spectacular rates back then.
Re. NeXT's sale to Apple. Yes, Jobs kept the shares. He _started the damned company!_ It was HIS money that was risked, not his employees'! Even so, many ex-NeXT staffers came to work for Jobs at Apple too, and they presumably did get share options as part of their pay deals. So it's not as if nobody benefited at all.
Jobs reminded the world how it's done. THIS is how you ran a company. It took him a while to learn how to do it—he was right about being ousted from Apple back in the mid-80s was the best thing that ever happened to him—and he came damned close to failing at NeXT and Pixar. He got lucky. But he knew how to capitalise on that luck too.
It's a shame he died so young, but there's no denying that he'd already lived a more eventful life than most of us.
(And it's amazing just how far ahead of its time NeXTStep was. OS X's Interface Builder is still recognisable from that video, as its power.)
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"We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die." -S. Jobs
"Life's but a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, then is seen no more. It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" W Shakespeare (Scottish Play)
Which is more fitting?
MikeBelmes wrote:
"Like most people with a touch of genius, he had quite an odd personality. I have 2 recollections of him from my childhood.
1 - He was a bully (verbally and physically) to the young kids, not nice at all (we were on the same swim team (Mtn. View Dolphins) and my sister and his sister (from his adoptive parents) were best friends for a time. My mom advised me to stay away from him. We also car pooled with them for a while.
2 - He took a starters pistol which had been converted from a real pistol, aimed at someone and shot it. Fragments from the converted pistol shot out(I don't know how) and hit someone...I don't remember who. He was kicked off the team."
Source: < http://www.livinginvietnam.com/index.php/forum2/Living-in-Ho-Chi-Minh-City/9250-Grim-Reaper-stops-by-Jobs-house.html?Itemid=0#9267 >
The starter pistol was not converted from a real gun. Sometimes there is discharge from the "blanks" that are loaded into the pistol to make the sound. I know because I have the starter pistol.My dad was the coach of the MV Dolphins when Steve was on the team. I am sure the incident happened. I am just that it was not a real gun (btw-starter pistols did look like real guns in those days).
It truly says something about life that you can struggle against the odds, make it to the top, make your mark on the world, and still die at a fairly early age at the top of your game due to circumstances utterly beyond your control.
If there is an afterlife, I wonder if he has regrets, like not treating some of his employees a little better... Regardless, having gotten my first computer (a Commodore PET) in those early days, it makes me feel old.
Not just him, but I never bought any of his products. This doesn't mean they're bad and it doesn't mean I disliked him. It means I don't like being manipulated, and I don't subscribe to hype if I recognise it.
I would never buy any machine where the performance was deliberately set low, and the design precluded upgrading, just so the next version could be bigger. This doesn't make him brilliant, it makes the purchaser a chump. This is business I agree. But like Yoda saying "Not many of those, wars not make men great." it may be business, but that makes him successful, not brilliant, nor good.
I don't subscribe to any service either, if I can help it, that precludes me moving away. There's nothing consumer friendly about iTunes for instance, it survives because it finds enough people to lock themselves in; all other music services fail because they're too nice to their customers. I despair at people who say, "I think XXXX is brilliant because he's tricked me into a contract where I can't leave without great expense to myself."
I don't really rate his "I work for a dollar" pronouncement either, if I had 8 billion dollars by engineering people into contracts where they were there because of my persona, I wouldn't charge people for my hobby either.
He also found some great designers to work for him, but above all, he crafted a public facing image for a company that Microsoft would die for, and a customer following that is akin to religion. I don't really rate this either. Religious adherence to anything precludes original thought.
He was undoubtedly bright, but so are lots of people. Having watched MSDOS destroy CP/M, Oracle destroy Ingres, and c++ defeat Ada in the real time arena, I view success as the sum of luck, marketing, customer ignorance, and right place right time and the biggest of these is luck. Success at business is mostly luck in my opinion, mostly luck, even if the successful look back and think it was mostly destiny. Business success means just that, business success. It may lionise, but doesn't beatify someone. I respected his business, but I've had eleven Toyotas in a row, and have never had an Alfa. I also have no problem with his early adopter customers, but this doesn't make him brilliant, it makes his customers who they are.
That said, why would I be happy that he died? The answer is I'm not, as he had more to give. But thousands of people died on Omaha beach because one stupid general refused mine clearance equipment because the mine clearer looked stupid. I feel more loss for all of them, who died because a guy wouldn't take something because of what it looked like, rather than what it did, than a guy who makes things that people buy because of what they look like, and not what they do, even if all my mates own one of his products.
Not to mention that he admitted he destroyed his teacher's life and never apologised for it. People are worthless in my book if, on recognising their failures, they don't atone.
I imagine quite a few red arrows, but he was just a business man. He sold toys that were easy to use, and looked nicer than other people's. He didn't cure cancer.
Although undoubtedly a personal tragedy and a very sad event, let us not forget that Steve Jobs, plus Bill Gates and the rest of that ilk presided over the destruction of the British consumer computer industry in the mid-80's.
Remember Sinclair? Acorn? Tangerine/Oric? Nascom? Dragon, Newbrain and many other small, innovative home grown companies that were just wiped out. in just a few short years.
Had some of them still been around 10 years later I am pretty sure we would have seen locally created MP3 players long before the iPod plus all the other technologies.
And a large chunk of the technology that the big companies claim to have created was in fact bought in, stolen or lifted from other companies. And we all know where the name 'Apple' came from!
So I say, lets mourn the man, but lets not forget the consequences of what happened to our own computer industry.
Reg, good job, you did your homework, and really brought it home with this one. The only thing I might add, is Jobs wanted to capture the next generation by getting the iie into class rooms, thereby capturing them at a key point in their upbringing. I'm guessing he was inspired by Saul Alinksy
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