Back in 1999 or 2000, shortly after Steve had rejiggered the cafeteria staff, I was walking back to my office in another building with an "afternoon doughnut" - that is, one that hadn't sold in the morning at the coffee place in the main lobby, and probably sold at a discount.
I passed Steve in the hall and he glared at me as I walked with my doughnut. Steve was in great health in those days while I was pasty and obese. (Still am, sad to say.).
But I was happy with my doughnut. Steve glared at me but didn't say anything. I slunk away.
The next day, there were no more doughnuts at any of the cafés on the main campus. I don't think it's a coincidence.
My only other story would be walking around a pillar in the cafeteria and smacking him face to face as he came around the other side. He said excuse me and moved aside!
This little story is great. It's anecdotes like this (and on the linked URL) that I would have liked to see in that Jobs movie. Paint a very interesting picture of Jobs, with fresh perspectives.
He paid attention, just the wrong kind of attention -- crackpot cuckoo crazy alternative medicine attention. If he had received the recommended surgery immediately upon the initial diagnosis, he very likely would still have been alive.
Didn't he have pancreatic cancer? That's not the kind a little chemo can fix. It has a very high rate of mortality. Patrick Swayze died from it not too long before Jobs.
I'm not defending the new age medicine he opted for first. But I don't think it's what caused his death. Might have hastened it a little is all.
These are generally fair better behaved than the more common and far more deadly type of cancer you are probably familiar with, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. While pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas have a dismal prognosis, most neuroendocrine tumors have a good survivability index.
If he's already aware of the idea that being fat and pasty is bad for him, he probably doesn't need people on HN telling him that.
I used to be fat. I knew it was unhealthy. It was incredibly obnoxious and, frankly, unhealthy, to hear people tell me that I needed to get healthy like I didn't know better. What I needed was to get away from poisonous relationships (I eat to cope with sadness) and hellhole suburbs that make it impossible to walk or cycle anywhere. Moving to the city and going out more instead of keeping a freezer full of crap made a world of difference. The assumption that a stranger on HN knows more about health than he does is insulting and counterproductive.
"What I needed was to get away from poisonous relationships (I eat to cope with sadness) and hellhole suburbs that make it impossible to walk or cycle anywhere."
Agree with this. In many (but of course not all)[1] cases there is a root cause to overeating in order to mask pain or give you pleasure.
The unfortunate part though is that not everyone can make a lifestyle change to remove the pressure or geography to allow them to make the needed changes. For example someone might be in a relationship and/or have children and need to work where they are or need a certain amount of $$. (But for sure that is not everyone.)
[1] While it is definitely true that there are people that have body types that prevent them from losing weight when this is not the case it usually boils down to some other issue that is causing the overeating or lack of control.
I'm confused. You suspect he stopped donut service for staff fitness reasons, or because there was no point to subsidizing them on-campus if people preferred to buy them elsewhere.
b. If he stopped all donut services because of one guy who looked unhealthy, then it again shows how capricious he was. One person who looked a little unhealthy ate a donut on one occasion and he removed donuts from every single store on campus for every single person for no reason other than he didn't like to see someone who looked pasty and obese walking around eating a donut.
Because that's the sort of guy Steve Jobs was. A sociopath.
Except that it is well known by people who follow this that the Washington Times is hardly any better than those tabloids that talk about Bigfoot or whatever. Read this article about its (now late) founder and tell me if you think he had a couple of screws loose: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61932-2004Jun... -- basically it's as if Kim Jong Il ran an American newspaper.
I just posted the first link that came up when I googled for Michelle Obama school lunch or something like that.
The poster to whom I was responding was associating the control of menus with sociopathy. I was simply pointing out that the First Lady is on record as attempting to do the same thing at a much larger scale.
No, I wasn't. I was referring to all the many, many clear documented other things that leads me to believe that Jobs was a sociopath. This is just one more example. To then turn around and accuse Michelle Obama of being a sociopath because of school lunches is, frankly, absurd. The response to your comments was actually pretty measured, given the ridiculousness of your answer.
You didn't bother to check the source? This is the Moonie-run "newspaper" that puts quotes on gay "marriage." The text of the article you posted is full of lunacy.
Could sympathy not have played a part? Given his position, Jobs could conceptually have held himself responsible for enabling poor nutrition.
Indeed, most organizations that offer on-site catering have such paternalistic concerns. Google historically (I don't know if it still does) limits and effectively taxes unhealthy food, while providing healthy food for free. Does that make Sergey and Page sociopaths?
I will add the disclaimer that what is healthy or not is a passing fancy, enduring unending change. But people act on the best knowledge they have, and often the best intentions.
As a counterpoint (and believe me, I take no pleasure in defending Jobs here) it would probably have been illegal to ban donut sales only to the obese.
Funny, I thought it was the discount price that was the cause, Jobs thinking people will only buy later for cheaper and he'll lose profits (I pictured him making money from Apple's cafeteria)
One time when I attended WWDC all the food served was vegan at the main social event. The impression here is Job's food preferences filter down as a mandate for all. At least in this instance.
OMG, I remember that year! It was even worse in 2003 when they moved it to Moscone. Fresh made Jamba Juice and mounds of Krispy Kreme donuts galore. It was super gross to be honest. :-) I haven't eaten a Krispy Kreme donut since that year.
I had to stop reading. I also worked for a micro managing CEO/President and I HATED EVERY MINUTE. Knowing that if you did the slightest misstep or were falsely accused you were fired and there was a morning meeting the next day to tell everyone that so and so was no longer with the company. NO THANK YOU!!!
It looks like some people like Steve are charismatic enough to get the complete devotion of very talented people. It's a great personality trait to have and pretty much guarantees success. We all know geniuses in our everyday life like Wozniak, Bob, cook. But how many of us can get these guys be terrified of us, make them change their lives for our visin and make them give us their complete attention... That's the beauty of Steve. Despite flaws in his character, people seem to be feel previliged working for him.
It's probably common in technology area that due to Dunning-Kruger effect many super talented engineers have low self-esteem and real-life skills, and are attracted by "magical" personalities, forming narcissist-codependent pairs. I see it all around, it's sad, but unless engineers fix their broken "insides", it's going to happen. It's then pretty logical that the narcissistic part of the pair gets all the fame, spotlight, power, and the co-dependent part gets used, squeezed, depleted and thrown away once not useful.
Many engineers spend their lives struggling to do great work within seemingly arbitrary constraints on budget, timeline, vision, or internal politics. Part of the power of Steve Jobs was that he removed many of those constraints, but in return demanded a very high level of innovation and quality.
D-K goes both ways - unskilled think of themselves highly, highly skilled lowly. I often wonder if this is the ultimate joke of the Universe embedded deeply in the fabric of "matrix".
I don't see how it's invalid to argue that they're just two sides of the same coin. If no-talent hacks think they're better than they are, how could the opposite not be true for the same underlying reasons?
Not logically ironclad, of course, but we are talking pop psychology here.
Because it's a fancy scientific-sounding way for nerds to look down on those stupid jocks who are so dumb they don't even know how dumb they are and thereby buoy our foundering sense of self-esteem.
It's probably common in technology area that due to Dunning-Kruger effect many super talented engineers have low self-esteem and real-life skills, and are attracted by "magical" personalities, forming narcissist-codependent pairs. I see it all around, it's sad, but unless engineers fix their broken "insides", it's going to happen.
Nailed it. Most of the Silicon Valley hotshots are those who've become extremely adept at exploiting talented people with low self-esteem.
I sort of find it a little sad that very talented people have this god like image of someone like Steve. Without them he would have been nothing, but still he gets all the glory and fear, and they get little respect.
You are generalizing, incorrectly. Many people (including myself) are quite aware of Steve's flaws, and yet appreciate the fact that in the end he Got Things Done and achieved impressive things.
Admiring or having respect for someone does not necessarily imply you're having a "god-like image" of the person, or that you're unconditionally accepting everything the person has done.
It's bizarre to me that people have this perception when Jony Ive is practically a household name in the US; not to mention that Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall all have been given props by Steve in his keynotes. I could rattle off more of Apple's senior leadership than any other tech company, so I really don't understand why people claim that Steve Jobs took all the glory.
Nobody denies that Jobs has a world-class ego, but I challenge anybody to point out where, in one of Jobs' keynotes or interviews, where he ever takes credit for an invention or innovation using "I" instead of "we."
The part of the cult of personality I find most fascinating is the attributions of Apple's successes to Jobs personally, but Apple's failures were attributed to the relevant teams, who 'let Jobs down'.
Competent leadership is, I'm finding, incredibly hard to come by. Most tech leaders I've had the fortune/misfortune to be under seem to be of the sort where they were in the right industry at the right time, and they were the only game in town. When it comes to demonstrating leadership and innovation, their ideas end up closer to "The Homer" (car on the Simpsons) than even the worst products Apple has come up with.
Judging by the number of high level departures from Apple after Jobs' death, it seems like that devotion to Jobs was the main glue holding those personalities together.
I always love to read Don's stories, they're always pretty great, and this post is no exception. The last few paragraphs are poignant, and not because it's about Steve, but because the emotion is real and you can relate to it.
Anyway, if you enjoyed this, you should read the history of Safari posts he did a while back, also a podcast he was a guest on one time, though I forget who it was with -- ah, Debug I think -- that was really excellent and well worth listening to.
Stories like this one and Glenn Reid's essay[1] about working with Steve on iMovie seem to be vastly more informative than any movie or book on SJ.[2] One of the biggest takeaways from both of these essays is that working with Steve was an iterative process. Pop culture always highlights "eureka" moments where a problem is solved all at once in a brilliant flash of insight, yet when you read these first-hand accounts, the story is the opposite: that making something great is a slow and repetitive process, with lots of follow-up meetings and gradual improvement towards the final product. Eureka moments look good on TV, but in the real world, great things are built by long-term focus and hard work from highly talented people with uncompromisingly high standards. I have no idea how or even if that could be shown in a movie, but I'm very thankful we have these accounts. I hope more people who worked with Steve during his second tenure eventually put their thoughts down in writing and share them so that we can all gain more of these types of insights.
This story says more about the insecurity of the Safari guy than it does about Jobs.
Sounds like people at Apple spent too much time worrying about what Steve thought of them, whether he'd remember their names or invite them to meetings.
While everyone is worried about what one man thinks, the man himself was thinking about design and business issues, trying to solve problems.
Funny how bookmarks was never really solved in Safari. On my iPad, I hate the bookmarks functionality, it confuses me pretty much every time. When I try to find a bookmark, or add a bookmark, every time it seems I have to "figure out" and remember how to do that. It's not intuitive or snappy. And now with iOS7 flat design, all your bookmarks and history appears as one big list - black text on white background. The lack of interface delineation mean elements bleed into other elements and make it harder to mentally remember where things are found.
If Steve were still around, he'd be kicking someone's ass over the half-baked iOS7 flat design.
I was reading and hoping there was an explanation why Safari for Windows discontinued. It is the only popular WebKit browser ( after Chrome fork to Blink ) on Windows.
Back in the iOS 1.0 days, the iPhone development platform was web apps. These were pushed by Apple as the "right way", which negated the need for an App Store. As the browser engine on iOS is basically identical to the desktop WebKit, I always assumed Safari for Windows was a push to enable iOS development on Windows.
With the release and success of the App Store, that became unnecessary. I guess killing it was a function of its relative lack of popularity; Apple in the Jobs 2.0+ era justifiably don't like keeping dead-weight projects around.
I always found it odd how Apple didn't follow windows user interface guidelines on Windows, forcing the Appleness on Windows. Weirdly, they don't follow their guidelines on Mac OS either, unless the crazy window design of iTunes is meant to be normal?
Just speculating, but probably Safari on Windows was a strategic play, to try to increase the adoption of WebKit and lessen the death-grip IE had on the internet then (and to encourage/give an easy way for web devs to target+test on more than just IE).
Much different landscape now. Most devs are running macs now anyway, Chrome exists and is very popular, etc.
It's certainly interesting to read this sort of reflection. The author discusses Jobs' mannerisms without either worshiping or demonizing him, which is refreshing.
It's not really a reference - read it over a bit more carefully and I think you'll get it. Basically, Phil is meant to believe that Steve actually was serious about putting the slide in the presentation.
I enjoyed the recollections. I probably would have been afraid of his shadow if I was there.
On another note, it would be interesting to see if a website containing all these memories of Steve Jobs ever comes about. A crowdsourced biography if you will: storiesabout/stevejobs .
At the National Air and Space Museum reception during Washington DC EduCom in 1988, I took a big bite out of one lobe at the bottom of a three lobed red bell pepper so it looked like an alien's face, and held it up to Steve Jobs, and said "Earthman, give me your seed!"
This part sums up why I quit using OS X for my personal projects: "And if your software crashed, you didn’t make excuses. You just made damn sure that particular scenario didn’t happen again. Ever."
In making sure nothing ever crashes, Apple has moved more and more to an OS that is too restrictive for my taste.
I fail to see how making sure your code doesn't crash is related to OS X being restrictive. We've just experienced Heartbleed, a prime example of a poorly-reviewed piece of software, in one of the most entrenched OSS libraries. I'd certainly appreciate a stricter process of code review and testing, considering the cost of patching it.
You being not a fan of OS X apparently clouds your judgement in this case.
Although I too switched away from OS X, this is irrelevant. The point of the story is not about Apple's idiosyncracies. It's about a man whose story is fragmented. It's about a man who was intriguing, cryptic, and unpredictable. It's another story in a bucket of stories of about him.
Actually, I don't see how it is an important story, though it was interesting to read, and I enjoyed it. As you said, it's one more story in a long list of stories.
Great stories. It says a lot about Apple that time, in addition to Steve. The personal side is good too.
Yes, Steve could be intense at times. But he was also a real person. He had to deal with the ordinary and mundane aspects of life like everyone else. Maybe even enjoy them.
If after working with him for a decade you have to take a deep breath before you can give him your honest opinion on something, then he's not a busy executive who prioritizes efficient information exchange, he's an asshole.
I honestly can't think of anything I've ever read about the guy that doesn't make me think that.
I also don't get the hero worship on HN for the guy, there are other actual hackers for worthier (in my opinion of course) of respect (as an aside I think Wozniak is worth far more respect than someone like Jobs).
Pretty trinkets combined with aspirational marketing and a form always beats function attitude and somehow this guy is a hero, never could figure it out.
Well, many people who actually worked with him disagree with you. I'm not sure what that means, there are definitely a few possibilities, but I think it's worth at least acknowledging that maybe you're wrong.
According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[65] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[66]
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End of story. Before continuing celebrating Jobs, ask yourself a question, do you want to promote that kind of behavior in the Valley?
I agree with you on principle, however, the story does not end here. Woz himself said the following:
"What Steve does on the good side — like the music scenario [in which] we didn't bring just a music device called the iPod, we brought a whole music system: a store that sells it, a computer that manages and organizes it. And an iPod is just a satellite to your computer. Plug it in and it works. You don't have to do anything. You've got to admire Steve for that kind of thinking. Nobody's perfect. [Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
Specifically:
"[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
I agree with you absolutely. If you are yourself encountering lies and nastiness from your partners, an enlightened way would be trying to understand them. And forgive.
But my point was different. We just can't afford to celebrate lies. It is very very very harmful.
I don't believe I have seen anyone, now or previously, saying anything like "Oh, and talk about business acumen -- look at the way Jobs soaked his old buddy Wozniak out of four and a half grand that one time!"
There's a vast difference between what you call "celebrating lies", and celebrating the life and work of a man who, while every bit as human as anyone else and with feet of clay to match, was nevertheless possessed of the sort of visionary genius which comes along perhaps half a dozen times in a generation. Certainly Steve Jobs could be, and was, a real revolving bastard from time to time. But so can everyone; people are complicated and they don't always behave in ways which others regard as preferable, sensible, or nice. If you're going to require sainthood as a prerequisite for honoring the accomplishments of a historical figure, I suppose that's your prerogative, but I suspect you'll find it a lonely stance to take, and I think it's strange you should utter it in the same breath as a word like "enlightened". Have you heard the one about the blind men and the elephant?
If you think Steve is the only person in the Valley to have lied to a business partner...I have a bridge that might interest you.
As for the specific event in question (the Atari money), do we know what Steve did with the extra money? Seems to me, maybe he really did need it (for rent/food/etc.) and was too ashamed to ask Woz for the extra. Maybe he figured he would re-invest it, and that it was easier to do behind Woz's back than to try and explain his plans.
Steve was no saint, but in my experience he was generally a nice guy. He also thought he knew better than everyone else, and so it would not be unusual for him to leave out explanations, make snap judgements, and be rather brusque in general (when dealing with business decisions). Why should he have to explain himself when he was obviously right?
I'm sure it didn't help that the world so often (especially toward the end) only reinforced the notion that he knew better than everyone else...
Fair point, but I generally seem to hear a lot of negative stuff about Steves personality. Sure give someone a second chance, but by the time they are on their tenth chance you have to start thinking differently.
> "[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
> I think that's a more enlightened point of view.
This kind of argument is weak. It's just a bland kind of truism that everyone can agree with that is unrelated to the original argument - when someone says that some one is a bad person, there is an implicit comparison to most people, ie the "badness" of a person is a relative one. Then bringing up some kind of absolute quality - perfection - is just trying to distract from the original argument.
But you can’t just name one bad thing a person did and say they are a bad person, no more discussion about it. That just makes no sense at all. It’s such a minor thing, too. His wage fixing together with Google and other companies is much more recent, relevant and much worse.
At the very least Steve Jobs was an intensely interesting person. I don’t think characterising him as a bad person makes much sense. This is such a simple-minded worldview.
I still don't see the big deal with iTunes and iPod's. ipod is a great product, but there is no real killer feature; "plug it in and it just works", yes, if you have iTunes. Meanwhile, plug in any decent mp3 player of that time\* and it Just Works, assuming you just have a file system - drog and drop the files you want into the mp3 player.
Maybe you could say that ipods with itunes is simpler than dragging and dropping like that. Though I don't see much of a diffrerence; drag and drop is a common action in Windows and the like. In order to selectively add files to your ipod you'd need to learn to drag and drop... in iTunes.
iTunes is an okay-to-annoying program, at least on Windows. I've bought music on itunes that I have to "enable" on every new PC I might use. The last time I tried it dodn't even work. I
ve bought an audio book that I have never been allowed to even play! iTunes can't (or couldn't) even compete with pirated media, not by a long shot.
\* let's say when mp3 players had a capacity that actually made them worthile, maybe as small a capacity as 256MB, or 512 and more.
Long before the music store existed, the iPod was entirely different than other MP3 players of the time.
When I got the first iPod, I also had a Creative Nomad player that had a little more storage and a search function. However, the iPod on the other hand had Firewire rather than USB 1.1, making it a painless process to add and remove songs right before you go somewhere, rather than a hours long process you had to plan in advance. Even more importantly the scroll wheel on ball bearings with made it feasible to fly through a tree of artists and albums with thousands of audio tracks.
The shift in convenience was on the level of shifting from a phonograph to a cassette tape, except that records are more convenient in some situations.
It wasn't the case of any individual feature of iTunes or the iPod, it was that iTunes and the iPod were the killer feature. If you were to have looked at the landscape at that time for MP3 players, there was nothing even remotely like the iTunes+iPod experience. Even the tagline of the very first commercial was ridiculous at the time: "iPod, a thousand songs, in your pocket." That was equivalent to Google giving people 1GB of storage with their GMail account.
It doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in 2001 it was a very big deal.
You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
> You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
I'm not a usability person, never claimed to be. I am a user who is sharing his experience with using ipods. In order to empathize with other people's experience I need to hear them first.
I feel like I'm being painted like "oh look, another tasteless nerd who doesn't _get_ the benefit of UX that comes in another flavour than a virtual terminal". I have never, ever touched a terminal unless I absolutely have to, right up until about my second year as a programmer, which learnt as an adult. I still think that things like terminals are overrated as far as streamlined work flow goes.
> The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
I haven't had the impression that ipods were such a revolution. Maybe it has to do with where I live.
I'll concede that the ipod was clearly simpler for people who thought dragging and dropping to a USB like thing was intimidating, and at the same time couldn't/wouldn't/had moral qualms about pirating music. I reckon ripping CDs was not a viable option for most people. I think I've only tried to do that once or twice myself.
I don't know where you live, but I think it's pretty well accepted that the iPod was a revolution. It swiftly and thoroughly dominated and expanded the MP3 player market, and set the bar for others to copy. Much like the iPhone did later. And the iPod came at the front end of the Apple renaissance, before they had the consumer mindshare and perception that they do now (in fact the iPod deserves most of the credit for vaulting Apple into that position).
I'm actually traditionally a Windows guy and scoff/roll my eyes at a lot of Apple stuff, but it's pretty undeniable that they've created some amazing, bar-raising products. They've done this by enforcing an uncompromising UX-first philosophy that covers all aspects of product design.
If anything I'm less technical than most HN users. I certainly was back when the ipod was new-ish. I was probably more technical than the average user at the time, though.
I gave concrete examples of the usability of the ipod. I would like it if people argued against those points, rather than some smartass, sarcastic response like the grandparent.
"You don't _get_ user experience, twenty years after even Microsoft got it."
Just as terse, no sarcasm.
I don't see how it saves time when it necessitates you to follow up with a wordy response - if you were after saving time, you wouldn't even have responded to my response. But I guess this is yet another case of me not _getting_ something.
Spend less time at your own computer and more time helping other people out with theirs. You'll "get" the reasons for Apple's success, soon enough.
You won't necessarily agree with those reasons -- I certainly wouldn't want everything to work like iTunes or my iPhone in general -- but you will understand why your limited perspective on UX doesn't catch on like Jobs's philosophy did.
You can admire Jobs for the good things he did while acknowledging the bad things. We are all human, all fallible, even our heroes. Sometimes, it's our bad deeds of the past that propel us towards the good deeds of later. Does that moment fully describe Jobs' life? Does his initial denial of his daughter Lisa describe his later relationship with her? I am sure not. Humans are not simple creatures.
It's good to remember this story too, because it shows that he was also a ruthless businessman, no matter how much effort he put into convincing everyone that this part was not "the real him".
And it's not a bad thing, it's part of the "whole truth" about someone and about how you need to be in order to succeed. And the fact that you need to be like that is not something that one should "sweep under the rug" or present as a "minor part of an otherwise great personality", because it does show you something: that at some level something is very wrong with the system and as much as we like to believe otherwise, fairness and success are a bit like having the cake and eating it too ...something that rarely happens.
So to be a great businessman, I just have to lie to people that help me, right?
I suppose it would revolve around what people think "success" is - if it means lying to others and abandonment of morals for personal gain, then that's a very sad definition of "success".
Well, he did say the truth about getting paid by Atari, and gave him "his half", which Woz regarded as "good enough compensation", otherwise he wouldn't have considered working with him in the future. It's kind of the same game played when a middle manager that brings no value to the company gets paid 3x the engineers salary, or when the CEO gets the golden parachute while the shareholders are loosing money and the employees are getting salary cuts or the company is getting downsized... but you don't go around calling people "liars" for playing this game as the corporate level, do you? Yeah, it's no longer "lying" because the information is theoretically available to all players, or at least to the IRS, but it's kind of the same game.
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship
I think also too a lot of people don't realize when they parrot out this story is that Jobs and Apple never abandoned Woz, Woz just chose at some point not to work there anymore and move on with his life. On his Wikipedia page it states that even though he no longer works there, he's still on the books as an employee and receives a stipend from Apple estimated at $120K.
I'm not sure how those two conclusions can be gleaned from this story.
It is pretty safe to assume that Steve Wozniak was not pulling the same types of shenanigans. And, it's really too bad if the story serves to normalize such behavior.
Second, it isn't a story about managers providing no value compared to less well paid engineers, it is a brilliant engineer letting something despicable pass because his partner brought so many non engineering assets to the table.
I think people should flee any company where there are dishonest managers who provide no value. It isn't uncommon to see companies that start out with comparable products, design and engineering talent diverge because one has a terrible management team.
The "stuff" is still there, in the company, allowing people to be employed for doing stuff they really like doing and to create more stuff... it's not as if he sold all his shares, converted it to gold and buried half of it in his tomb under a pyramid and left the other half of the gold to his children.
At least in 2000+ years we got to the level of social/human evolution where "the stuff" keeps flowing :)
I suspect a lot of it has to do with Self identification with Steve Jobs and people like him, so an attack on Jobs is an indirect attack on them.
Personally I think Jobs was an over hyped marketing manager (with perhaps a true gift for getting talented people to do the work).
There are dozens of people in the computer industry that I respect far more who will never get 1/100th of the adulation (and I'm not sure most of them would want it).
Look at the contributions of people like John Backus, Edgar Codd or Maurice Wilkes and of course Kernighan and Ritchie, those people (to me) are worth far more respect.
I am absolutely bored of Steve Jobs stories in general, and I'm quite surprised at myself that I bothered to read this one.
This one in particular, though, was a human enough perspective that it would have been interesting to read if every single mention of the particular terrifying-and-respected-CEO were redacted. So I'm glad I read it.
I passed Steve in the hall and he glared at me as I walked with my doughnut. Steve was in great health in those days while I was pasty and obese. (Still am, sad to say.).
But I was happy with my doughnut. Steve glared at me but didn't say anything. I slunk away.
The next day, there were no more doughnuts at any of the cafés on the main campus. I don't think it's a coincidence.