Reminds me of that story someone (Forstall?) told about Steve at the apple cafeteria. He would go there every day for lunch and they had some program where they’d take your lunch out of your paycheck. Steve started laughing about it one day and when asked what was so funny, he said that his salary was only $1 a year so he had no idea who was paying for his lunch.
In my first company, when we set up payroll we had to assign employee numbers. Since I was setting it up I wanted to be employee #0 to see what would happen. The payroll company was smarter: the numbers had to start with 1, which was much less interesting.
Redditors are all up in arms over this, doing everything they can to downplay Jobs' role in Apple's success, going as far as to say "apoptosis had the final laugh".
To play Devil's Advocate - if giving someone a special number on their employee badge makes them happy, let them have it. I'm sure they had much bigger problems to solve than which employee number they should each have.
This is just one thing of many. A more unexcusable asshole behavior is him using Woz's help to design the Atari board for brickbreaker, lying about the payout then pocketing the vast majority of it. It shows the kind of guy he is. People blow off asshole behavior in executives all the time by claiming that anything is excusable because it serves the higher goal of the company, but there's no higher goal when it's just extra cash for yourself, it's just pure greed, or perhaps expressing a hidden resentment that someone else did something great and you needed their help.
Absolutely. I remember reading some biography about him that my dad bought me when I was in high school. I was like, shit finally I'll figure out what made this guy so great.
You come out the other end only thinking, wow. What a fucking asshole. A talented asshole, but an absolute piece of work
Sure, but there's obviously a spectrum to how people act due to a lack of maturity and wisdom, and it's not obvious to me that Jobs fell into the normal range of immature behavior rather than being much more conceited and selfish than average. It's also not like he didn't have plenty of time to recognize his mistakes and try to make amends and act differently going forward, and it doesn't really seem like he ever grew in that regard.
"One of the frustrating things, and many of us probably experiences this in their lives, is that as you grow and mature you change, but people are constantly treating you as though you are still the same person you were when you were 18 or 19." - Steve Jobs.
I find it hard to believe that most people he interacted with in the last 2-3 decades of his life as a wealthy, famous CEO treated him the same way he was treated as an unknown young adult. Regardless, it's not clear to me that this is much of a rebuttal to what I said above; I made the assertion that he didn't stop acting selfishly later in life, and a pithy quote doesn't demonstrate any evidence of better behavior.
Look up the interviews with people who actually worked for him and with him on YouTube. He successfully recruited and retained top talent, and inspired fierce loyalty at Apple, NeXT and Pixar. Hard to do if you treat people unfairly.
If you’re good enough at it, “telling other people what to invent” may be the single most marketable skill in the history of humanity. I wish someone would tell me what to invent.
Wow. Are you one of those people who posts on LinkedIn about how they'd turn down a million dollars for the chance to wait on a billionaire's table?
Please. Steve Jobs is only famous because he was an asshole.
He did have other qualities, including that of recognizing talent and inspiring them. His interest in counterculture probably served him well in other ways, but that was not particularly unusual for his time.
Steve Jobs' path to being a billionaire required the sheer gall to steal others' work, and bully employees into burnout, over and over again.
na, I'm one of those people who realize there is a lot of nuance to the world, and there's nothing to gain by just painting everything black and white.
Does this make it impossible to separate his approach and impact on Apple's design aesthetic?
I know a lot of people know about how he treated his employees and his textbook narcissistic behavior (which you point out) and they just disregard his behavior because of his incredible eye for design how it impacted Apple's design for decades before he passed.
Its as if the impact he had was the greater good for the company so the rest of his questionable behavior gets ignored.
I think as an isolated incident it wouldn’t be a big deal, but Jobs’ general behavior towards his employees and specifically Wozniak justifies some of the resentment people feel toward him.
This is one of the things that always got me. People always seem to act like Woz is just too nice to be outraged on his own behalf or something, and we need to do it for him.
Woz is a smart guy and a definite people person. He likely knew what kind of guy Steve Jobs was and probably just made peace with it. We compromise on people we know doing far shittier things to us than Jobs did to Woz, and yet we can't fathom how someone like Woz can accept that Jobs is Jobs and deal with it.
The guy made Apple what it is. The most impactful technology company in the history of humanity. You can call him whatever you like and I will cut him a slack.
Most people miss the point. Yes great companies are created by not just the founders but all of its employees. Everyone contributes to a certain extend. But it is really the founders who steer the ship in the right direction. Without Jobs last 10 years would certainly be very very different. Think about a world where your only choices were Windows or a crappy Android phone.
> The guy made Apple what it is. The most impactful technology company in the history of humanity. You can call him whatever you like and I will cut him a slack.
Even if I were to agree to the premise that the ends justify the means (which I don't), that still doesn't address the fact that we don't know if he succeeded because of his brutish personality or in spite of it. For all we know, he could have been even more successful if he treated people decently.
For another perspective, an iPhone looks a lot like a Newton with phone capabilities. Maybe without Jobs returning to Apple, Apple would still be in the phone market.
It reads like PR, you bought too much into their powerpoint presentations. No, the tech world wouldn't be very different without Apple in it, I can certainly imagine a similar tech world without Apple.
Also I'm using Android and I don't see how it's supposed to be crappy, the iPhone was the worst phone I ever owned and I'm glad it broke down by itself, to each their own.
Would Android still exist (in it's current form) without Apple?
It's non inconceivable that modern smartphones would be a further evolution of Windows Mobile and or Symbian. With quite different UX (for better or for worse)
Whether Android would exist in its current form is kind of irrelevant. We'd have had useful devices anyway, because they'd just have been the next step of the evolution of what was possible and what people wanted. I'd argue that many features of Android / iOS aren't actually the best design, they're just what we happened to end up with.
The PalmPilot devices were pretty good and pre-dated the iPod by many years (IIRC even the Treo with a built in phone pre-dated the iPhone). If Apple had never made their leap from iPod to iPhone, I'm sure the Palm line would have continued its market dominance a lot longer, although by then Blackberry was also becoming a larger player in this market too and also might have lead to the complete demise of Palm even without Apple introducing the iPhone.
Not saying Palm didn't have other problems - the PDB format was quite restrictive, and it was clear that early on Palm didn't even have proper documentation on how it worked as they'd just licensed it from someone else (and ironically, it was actually based on Apple Mac's resource forks).
So, yeah, maybe we would have more Windows phones now, maybe Symbian, maybe RIM, maybe Palm. I'm sure the UIs wouldn't have ended up the same as we have now, but whatever I'm sure the feature set would have ended up similar because that's mostly just the intersection of what's possible to do with current technology and what people want to do.
Wasn't the smartphone/PDA market about evenly split between MS, Blackberry, and Palm by the time the iPhone came out (and Palm was losing its market share at a very fast pace over the last few years)? I would've bet that Windows Mobile would become the default option without Android/iOS
> I'm sure the feature set would have ended up similar because that's mostly just the intersection of what's possible to do with current technology and what people want to do.
Considering how much Windows Mobile improved between ~2000 and 2010, I wouldn't be that certain. Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, and higher-end Symbian/UIQ weren't really that appealing to most consumers, and I'm not sure any of those companies were really that interested in changing that without some external disruption. Of course, this would have come from somewhere eventually, but everything would probably have been a lot slower, and we would have been stuck with keyboards for a few additional years (if not more). On the bright side there we'd probably have more than 2 options now because alternative systems would've had a bit more time to mature.
The UX might have turned out a little bit different but the smartphone would have been pretty much the same thing. My opinion is what permitted the existence of smartphones wasn't Apple but superior mobile hardware & mobile data tech which was emerging.
Those PDAs looked like this because their only business model possible was note taking for business uses because of pricing issues, mobile data issues and processing power issues.
But was anyone else besides Apple seriously considering releasing a device with no keyboard and non-horrible software/UX (admittedly of course the first iPhone was probably closer to a toy than a real "smartphone")?.
Windows Mobile barely changed in the 10 years after Pocket PC was first released. I don't think hardware limitations were the main cause of that. Microsoft (or rather the faceless design committee) simply had no imagination and were more than happy to see their market share grow by 10-30% every year in a fast growing market (well.. who wouldn't?).
Back in 2010 I had a HTC HD2, hardware wise it seemed to be several years a head of iPhone 3GS/4 but for some reason it was still running iPaq software.
Sure and that's why they had a first mover advantage but I wouldn't expect that first mover advantage would have lasted more than 2 years if they did not attempt it.
> I don't think hardware limitations were the main cause of that.
Mobile processing power really sucked and 4G only got released in 2009. Resistive screens were also pretty unusable before that.
Maybe so. I'm not even sure that's a bad thing. The defining trait of iPhone is that it made mobile Internet connectivity (I hesitate to say "computing" since 99% of what people do is just use these devices as dumb terminals, TVs, or cameras) a thing everyone has and takes for granted.
But given what we've actually done with this tool, arguably the world was better when this wasn't true, with the minor (in the grand scheme) exception of a boom in software jobs like my own.
I would rather be a paid shill for Apple than use an Android phone very easy choice :)
Jokes aside if you do not see how Apple is far superior in quality of their products in consumer electronics there is not much to discuss.
It's just opinions, to each their own. I used an iPhone for a year to prevent ewaste of my wife so I know what I'm talking about when I say it's the worst phone I ever owned, I'm not talking randomly, I used it.
Now it's stuck in a software error loop where you can't install or update apps and that was the final nail in the coffin, I was too lazy to reformat it.
It’s like a football (soccer) team. Yes the players are playing and scoring goals. But a great coach (SAF) is just as important as a great team. Without him, the same team doesn’t perform the same.
Anyone who doesn't recognize what Jobs did for Apple doesn't understand business. The better mousetrap does not have consumers beat a path to your door. (Technology? See Sony Betamax vs. default VCR).
Wozniak on the other hand is way overblown in capabilities. It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role. Jobs was truly unique and while he had for sure people who helped him realize the dream (and of course luck and timing ... that he was able to motivate and berate with his reality distortion field etc) no question he was the unique driving force behind Apple (when they started and when he returned after being forced out).
But it's not like Jobs first stint at Apple (or really Apple itself) was necessarily such a remarkable success (at least compared to what happened when he came back). In the second half of the 80s and in the 90s Apple was merely the best of the also-ran.
> But there were many that could have filled that role.
Wasn't Apple II pretty much the thing that kept the company afloat? The Lisa was a disaster and the early Macintosh despite the impressive marketing wasn't such a great machine either. Between 1984 and 1989 Apple still sold about 3.5x more Apple 2s than Macintoshes. Of course Macs were generally 2-3x more expensive but still it seems pretty remarkable that a computer Wozniak pretty much designed singlehandedly back in 1977 remained competitive for more than 10 years with not that many fundamental changes.
By the Macintosh truly successful (not compared to Wintel of course) Jobs and most of his influence on the company and it's culture etc. were long gone.
The same thing happens with Musk. I hate Musk as much as the next guy, I am anything but a fanboy and I don't have or want a Tesla. Still it is delusional and childish to insist that Tesla and SpaceX would have been just have successful without him.
I read something like "the internet has killed nuance" and it's so true. Could terrible people also be successful businessmen? Nope! All good or all bad any anyone who says anyone in between is blinded by their adoration.
Just based on politics alone, many people feel morally obligated to hate him now because he's decided to hang his hat on one particular side of the toxic US political system. And as addicted as he is to attention and pop culture relevance, he can't stop attracting ire by doubling down on every hot take he has.
> I really don't understand this meme. If you want people who deserve hate, the history books are full of them.
100%.
I see more people saying they hate Musk and Zuckerberg than I see people who say they hate Hitler or even modern authoritarian rulers and mass murderers.
I think social media has made us all more sensitive, cranky, and judgmental. It's a recent phenomenon.
We used to hate bin Laden. Now we hate CEOs, celebs, and social media personalities.
> It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role.
Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.
Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.
No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.
[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.
There are some pretty insane optimizations for code size, and the result is a remarkably capable program in just 256 bytes. You don't get this stuff from a replacement-level engineer.
Yup. To put it another way, if any company back then had Woz building things with that high a capability to cost ratio, it would have been very easy for them to punch way above their weight and capture significant share with even modest marketing talent.
And arguably, Apple could have been much more successful in the 80s and 90s if they had leveraged technical excellence at an Apple II-like price point, instead of ascending into the pricing stratosphere like they did in our actual timeline. Jobs arguably realized this a bit, as he priced the iMac ($1299) a lot better than the Macs that came before it (about $1699 for a comparable all-in-one in 1997).
He suffered a TBI in an airplane accident in 1981 or so. Though IIRC, most of the design of the original Mac's framebuffer design (likewise done with in-house engineering and not with a off the shelf VLSI controller as was seen in other contemporary platforms) was his work.
I'm sorry, but this man got critical UI/UX paradigms right twice (iPod, iPhone) and used that position of strength to inflict his controlling views upon the entire computing industry.
I want to be in the universe where this didn't happen. Where there are six major types of smartphone. Where Google Android isn't the most open things can be. Where your smartphone provider isn't your email provider, isn't your photo bucket, isn't your banking, isn't your movie film entertainment provider. Where you can install what you want and easily switch devices. Where no company is too big.
Smartphones aren't computers in the Jobs universe. They're branded platforms wholly and totally owned by the company that makes them.
The 1990 - 2010 era was the best time we had in computing. The web was so open and everyone used it for everything. After Jobs showed what level of top-down control was legally possible, everyone has been chasing the "App Store" model and the "Platform" model and the "Walled Garden" model.
Zoomers don't know how awesome RSS and bittorrent were. How you could use any program to consume content and ingest it, schedule it, remix it. There were programs where you could create your own TV channels. Your own news streams. You could run it on all of your devices.
Now everything is super locked down, product manager-ed to a single customer experience, and rented to you. Meanwhile, Google is trying to DRM what's left of the web. Things are looking incredibly bleak.
Jobs put us on this path of not having devices and data streams open. But now you can choose one of three premium experiences.
iPod is what put them on their stratospheric trajectory. Any company with that product and that execution at that point in time could have achieved the same outcome.
iPod-iPhone wasn't a pivot, but it was different than everything that came before. It opened up a massive new market and made them who they are today. They struck gold: right time, right place, right mindset.
Android owes their huge level of success to entering the market at the same time. From that they were able to establish their duopoly. Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm, and Nokia took too long and got forever shut out.
Timing matters. Holding a captive audience with low churn also matters (even if keeping the jail cell locked is one of the techniques used to accomplish it).
But back to my earlier point - if everything wasn't so incompatible with everything else, we'd see a market that supports more than just two players.
Yes, and it's extra painful that most "apps" on the "App Store" are just thin wrappers around web technologies anyway. You have to have an iPhone[1] or Android because you "have to use the app" for lots of things from mobile food ordering to ticket purchasing -- and yet most of these apps have little to no native code, and despite our phones being 100x more powerful, these apps are more laggy than a BlackBerry or Sidekick app was, because they're bloated beyond belief.
[1] From my experience, even Android is an iffy choice in America, because 99% of the execs here who allocate the resources in companies use iOS, so they don't mind when the Android app is barely usable. This is a peculiarity of the US though, elsewhere Android is considered equal or greater in importance.
It's easy to say, Apple was entirely Woz and Steve Jobs was just a freeloader.
That's a nice story, but managing talent is difficult as being a good engineer does not mean you are a good entrepreneur, or are good at business. Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
> Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company. Intel itself was started when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (an engineer and a physicist) left Fairchild Semiconductor as part of the "Traitorous Eight". Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann (both engineers) left Intel to form Zilog. Chuck Peddle left Motorola and formed MOS Technology and create the 6502. CPU design in fact is one of those fields that almost requires real world experience somewhere before you can really innovate in the field. There's just too many tradeoffs to be balanced.
Why haven't we seen that recently? I think it's the leftovers of the 80s, with financiers being unwilling to commit capital to engineer heavy executive teams in capital intensive fields like CPU production anymore. Talking with financiers, there's almost this infantilizing group think that engineers can't be trusted with money and MBAs are required to hold the purse strings. The same thought process that decided that hospitals shouldn't be run by doctors anymore and that universities shouldn't be run by professors anymore, leading to the rise of the administration class and incredible amounts of unfortunate externalities from those decisions.
I think that's why we're starting to see a renaissance in CPU design. The tail end of Moore's law is democratizing access to high end CPU design, allowing individuals (albeit with relatively high net worth from previous CPU design) like Jim Keller to put their money where their mouth is and work with a small team of very good engineers to create companies without involving much in the way of traditional VC.
There are more examples. Pretty much every every successful company in the CPU design space was headed by engineers.
The point is that hard engineering companies used to be formed and headed by engineers, including most of the juggernauts of today.
So when the parent said
> And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
I feel like that's untrue. Just about every major company in the space was formed by engineers forming a new company after getting fed up with their job, creating a titan that challenged their original company.
Small correction: MOS Technology was an already existing company known for its calculator chips when Peddle took his team from Motorola to work there.
A very interesting recentish example was Andreas Olofsson leaving Analog Devices in 2008 (where he had been designing DSP chips) to found Adapteva to create his Epiphany chip with 16 (and later 64, with 1024 planned) RISC processors essentially in his home. He had a bit of success with the Parallella board on Kickstarter to show off the chip.
The story is complicated, sure, but those are three of the most complex and capital intensive businesses anywhere. Being "good at business" is not enough to enter a mature business with such high start-up costs, strong scale and network effects, etc.
Literally the most absurd statement. Woz wasn't even involved in anything Apple did later which led to the huge size they are now and the existing product line. Doesn't even matter if the iphone (or imac) was Job's idea or not. He was the driving force that made that happen
At the same time, it does speak to an almost childish obsession with recognition and being seen by the outside as the "most genius". I think the extreme vanity demonstrated by Mr. Jobs was both a huge factor in his success but also the thing, in some ways, held him back. "Held him back" is of course relative. He had more success than almost anyone in the modern technological era, but could he have had even more? Who knows.
But I also don't understand why Reddit commenters, or anyone, would care so much as to be "up in arms" over this or any anecdote about corporate gamesmanship.
Well, imagine if he didn't build this persona. Would he have succeeded in getting investments for NeXT? Would employees have worked for NeXT inspired by him? Would Apple have ever bought NeXT?
I did not mean it was not reasonable, but it was still childish. The more important point is that many anecdotes exist (with the low trust that we should have all in anecdotes) pointing to him never growing out of that.
> Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight.
AE says:
> The badges included a name and an individual employee number, the latter based on the order in which workers joined the company. Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1, Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on.
The former has more details and different intention for the initial numbering.
