Cringely's Lost Jobs Interview: Coming To a Theater Near You 206
A few weeks ago, Robert X. Cringely revealed that a long-lost, hour-long interview he conducted of Steve Jobs in 1995 had been found. Now, it seems the lost tape has found its calling: the movies. Says the linked Economic Times story: "The interview will be shown at Landmark theaters in 19 cities around the country beginning Nov 16."
Re:Boring. (Score:3, Interesting)
All this news about Steve Jobs is getting rather boring and repetitive.
I turned to the discovery channel today and they had a special on Steve Jobs. They credited him with making Pixar the great success it was even though he did non of the technical work. They credited him with single handedly forcing the music industry to adopt $1/song pricing. They stopped just short of crediting him with inventing the mp3 player. I'm surprised at that restraint - I thought they were going to credit him for inventing oxygen and water! Mikio Kaku, both the Mythbusters, and lots of other guests who may or may not have met jobs crediting him with genius, while all the people that did the actual innovation don't get a mention. It's sickening to anyone with a modicum of respect for the truth and credit where it's due.
Promises, promises (Score:4, Interesting)
Cringely reached his peak during the making of "Triumph of the Nerds" and the follow up series "Nerds 2.0.1". They were both some of the best historical documentaries ever done on the PC and Internet revolutions. Since then he has failed to deliver on subsequent projects.
Here's hoping there is one more great documentary series left in the old Cringe!
A call to all Slashdotters (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Innovation in perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Even really good salesmen can't redesign a user interface for iDVD over a room full of designers and technicians.
http://lunchpail.knotice.com/2011/10/07/paying-tribute-to-steve-jobs/ [knotice.com]
He was more than what you're trying to reduce him down to.
Re:Innovation in perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
he was very good at combining other people's ideas and making something unique out of it.
That's partly true but misses the big picture. If you read the biography - and I strongly recommend you do, it isn't just "Jobs is an a**hole" anecdotes, there's some really fascinating stuff in there - you see that Isaacson portrays Jobs as having two key strengths.
The first was that Jobs had a strong intuition about what people wanted (e.g. a mass-market GUI computer with the Mac or a fully licensed, easy-to-use music download store with iTunes, etc.) so he pushed for Apple to build those things where they previously didn't exist. That's why he's cited as "innovative" even though other people did the actual work. The second was that he was a perfectionist - to the point of near-insanity actually - so he pushed people really hard to build stuff that it was so good that people didn't just like it, (some) people LOVED it... hence the Cult of Mac, etc. Very few if any big companies these days have perfectionists at the helm who insist they make things "insanely great" or don't make them at all, and that's why he was unique.
The flipside to this is that, as Isaacson repeatedly shows, Jobs was more or less a complete fail as a human being. The book is pretty clear that his infantile and sociopathic behavior was tolerated throughout his life precisely because he was so good at the other two things, and it built his legacy at the expense of his ever "growing up" into a decent person. So it's a really nuanced picture of the guy and very very much worth a read if you're interested in a more sophisticated view of Jobs than "he didn't do anything but market shiny things and yell at people."