They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference.
The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.
To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
Oft repeated, and not untrue, but very incomplete.
Jobs also made a lot of people. A lot of fortunes in SilVal only exist because of Steve Jobs.
He also virtually single handedly and without much fanfare at the time or credit in the history books created the employee compensation model that came to define SilVal success, with workaday employees and especially engineering contributors receiving stock options to reward them and keep them invested in the company's success.
I don't disagree with what you say, but I have literally never seen or heard "SilVal". Is this a common shorthand? I hear "the Valley" and see "SV" but never this halfcronym.
You are correct that jobs made a ton of people - and not just wealthy, he created an entire ecosystem around Apple, which made a large number of people vast sums of money.
That last part however.. is not actually true - Fairchild Semiconductor did it, and did it far before Apple did. I'd like to say intel (and a ton of others) did the same thing.
Sure, but he was cruel for no reason to many people who did not deserve it, I don't even care about his tech problems. Nobody should park in the handicap stalls without a license plate because he keeps leasing new cars.
You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.
Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).
The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.
But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.
I do wonder if it's possible to be a brilliant marketer, and reach the levels Jobs did, without being an asshole. The core of the profession is learning how to manipulate and use people better than anyone else.
I believe that's what Isaacson tries to write about in the Jobs and Musk biographies, indirectly. He seems to think that being an asshole has nothing to do with being brilliant.
Personally, I think it has more to do with having an emotional hole. Creators who do so primarily for its own sake, be they musicians, visual artists, or coders, are different from those who want to rule the world. The latter may genuinely enjoy the craft, but it's often subordinate to the deeper need for validation (see: emotional hole). It's this need that makes people assholes, imo.
And still, when it comes to built-in accessibility, Jobs is pretty much famous for his "fuck ROI" statement. He set precedence around 2007, which eventually forced other players like Google and Microsoft to follow. These days, Talkback and Narrator are builtin for both OSes, which is mostly because Apple went there first. This move changed the lifes of a a few million people.
I'm not sure what to believe. I know he was incredibly demanding, and I've heard the stories, but he also inspired a lot of loyalty and commitment from plenty of very talented engineers who were not short of other options.
Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
> Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
> He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
So about this, I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in 6th grade and this is something which troubles me from watching it (multiple times as it was the only offline movie I had so much so that I once gave a mini speech in class about steve jobs haha & one of my teachesrs started calling me steve jobs haha!)
But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa. I mean iirc he did try to connect with her later but still, I just don't understand why he acted so harshly towards his mother when everything could've been going fine.
Like there were definitely plenty of moments in the movie where steve jobs wasn't the right guy. I really can't find the rationale behind some of the things.
I feel like I still don't know what to make of the whole situation regarding Steve jobs. but when you mentioned this comment, while reading it I imagined the point where Steve jobs offered Lisa a flower.
I remember this because many years after watching the movies, this youtube video came to my feed (I searched it again by just searching some PoSV related thing with lisa flower to find it)
And even the director of the movie commented in the comments of this video which was pinned!
As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.
Martyn Burke
Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley
>But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa.
Jobs was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, almost singularly focused on doing what he did in the computer industry, by the time Lisa was conceived. His relationship with Lisa's mom, Chrisann Brennan, had begun during his wild-seed-sewing hippie days. My read on it is, he looked at the relationship with Chrisann as a remnant of a past he wanted to leave behind, and the potential relationship with Lisa as a sink for his energies that didn't fit the image he wished to concoct for himself.
Steve Jobs was a flawed human, like we all are. And like all of us, his flaws were inseparable from his strengths and achievements. As someone who didn't have to experience any of those direct flaws, I feel incredible gratitude for how his achievements changed my life and the world generally, and hope that those people he hurt can forgive him.
The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.
To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.