Steve Wozniak "Steve Jobs Played No Role In My Designs For the Apple I & II" 440
mikejuk writes: In a recent interview with very lucky 14-year old Sarina Khemchandani for her website, ReachAStudent, Steve Wozniak was more than precise about the role of Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He'd never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn't know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to do. The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed." He also says a lot of interesting things in the three ten minute videos about life, electronics and education.
oops (Score:5, Funny)
i hear hissing sounds from the apple camp.
Common Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
Met Steve at the Apple booth ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
Apple ][ dev here as well. My recollection from those days was that Woz was the engineer and Jobs was the salesman. From Mac days onward Jobs was the salesman and the designer in the look-and-feel sense, not in any technical sense.
While sales and look-at-feel are certainly important, when at a '83 trade show as a developer and returning to our booth and telling my buddies I just talked to "Steve" for a few minutes over at the Apple booth, they were excited. Then I confessed it was Jobs not Woz and the mood shifted to, eh, ok.
We certainly recognized that Jobs was essential to Apple's success, its just that we were engineers and the business/sales side held little interest for us. Again, post-Mac, our appraisal of Jobs improved due to his look-and-feel design work.
Re:oops (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Jobs, Woz's designs would have been brilliant one-offs. Without Woz, Jobs would not have had anything to make a company from. So both were needed to create Apple. As Jobs said, "Great Artists Ship".
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Without Jobs, Woz's designs would have been brilliant one-offs
Not true at ALL. Most people don't know it, but the Macintosh almost destroyed Apple. Woz wanted to go along the Apple III/Lisa route (since he understood Apple's market in the 80's much better than Jobs, honestly), but Jobs (who was basically kicked out of the Lisa project) pushed the Mac and "won" (to Apple's detriment). Eventually (after Steve left) they fixed the Mac and made it a reasonably successful product - but he had almost nothing to do with that.
After Jobs rejoined Apple (with a lot more wisd
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He was a perfect visionary back then. But nothing more.
The Mac was over-priced and under-powered because you need roughly 512 KB- 1 MB of RAM to have a useful GUI on a powerful machine. And you could not do that in a reasonable price range in 1984.
He came back a) knowing how the finance end of the business operates, and b) understanding that sometimes you don;t release extremely cool tech until you get the price way down.
Re:oops (Score:4, Informative)
I remember it a little differently. I thought the Lisa project was no success and that macintoch was the product that got apple out of the garage to the second largest PC maker for the next decade, until windows 95 arrived.
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The prevailing wisdom was that the *case* was Jobs' idea.
Re:oops (Score:4, Funny)
The prevailing wisdom was that the *case* was Jobs' idea.
apparently before steve jobs, computers did not have cases
Re:oops (Score:4, Informative)
Not really.
Prior to 1977 the case was frequently something a hobbyist made himself. Since you had to custom-build everything, including most of the boards, yourself anyway it was not hard to sell something like the Altair [wikipedia.org].
Jobs didn't really invent the concept (three or four machines released that year had cases, and apparently some earlier machines with tape output also did), but it definitely was not standard before '77 and I sincerely doubt the Woz wasted brain space figuring out whether the damn thing was pretty.
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That's how I heard it, including the lack of a fan, which was needed as soon as you started filling up the slots.
Which means that most users never needed one. As "Apple" said in those days, that feature/functionality was left as a 3rd party opportunity. :-)
Re:oops (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically.
Although I'm not a fan of Apple or Jobs, I am a fan of Woz.
Re:oops (Score:4, Interesting)
Woz is AWESOME!
I was playing around with putting an Apple 2 on an FPGA (yeah, I know. Been done before). I design ASICs for a living. But staring as hit clock generation circuitry, I could not make heads or tails of how the darned thing actually worked!
Given the specifications, I have do doubt that I could make a circuit that would do the same thing in a more straightforward way, but it would probably be bigger and cost more.
Waz is extremely clever in optimizing things. FYI. If you have not heard the story, reading how the floppy drive controller was developed is an extremely interesting story.
I am NOT an Apple fanboy. I do not own a single Apple product except an Apple 2. I hate the way that the current Apple locks everything down.
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Forget ASIC design, unless you want to get a 2nd mortgage to license the tool chain for one year. Plus, mask sets will run anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 (depending on the geometry) to get the chip produced.
Learning an FPGA is actually surprisingly attainable. You can get many boards with smaller parts for under $100. The tool chain is free, but you are stuck with proprietary software.
My own experience is with Xilinx, but they recently went to a new "Vivaldi" software suite that supports the newer c
Re: oops (Score:4, Informative)
The original bearded nerd.
Uhm... no. The Bell Labs "neck beards" (Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Jon Postel, etc) were there first.
Re:oops (Score:5, Funny)
It's a chapple.
Good for him. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure we already all knew it, but it is good to hear it come from him for once.
Re:Good for him. (Score:5, Interesting)
Largest company by capitalization value, not by revenue. That just means the stock is way overpriced.
By revenue, Apple is ranked 17th.
Re: Good for him. (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about how much you make (revenue) , it's about how much you keep (profit).
http://fortune.com/2015/06/11/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies/
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Proving P.T. Barnum's maxim.
Re: Good for him. (Score:3)
Yes. You are absolutely right. Apple became the most profitable company in the world by "fooling" people. If only everyone was as wise as some random slashdot poster we would all be rocking Nomads.
Re: Good for him. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which flies straight in the face of the common (mis)belief that Apple hardware is better because it's more expensive.
Remember the quarterly smartphone sales numbers earlier this year which showed Apple making something like 90% of the profit in the industry? Most of the press spun it as Android phones having a profitability problem (they don't - their profit margin is exactly the same as the rest of the computer industry). Nobody bothered to crunch the numbers. If you do (profit / units sold), you'll find the "Apple tax" for buying an iPhone is $18.8 billion / 74.5 million [appadvice.com] = $252 per phone. That is, $252 of your purchase price doesn't pay for any better hardware or software or industrial designers or artists or even the guy in the mail room. It goes straight into the bank accounts of Apple and its stockholders as profit.
Re:Good for him. (Score:5, Informative)
Steve (Score:5, Insightful)
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be thankful or spiteful for your pitiful hundred million net worth.
Totally up to you, lad...
Re:Steve (Score:5, Interesting)
Devils advocate.
How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's? Jobs provided much success so people could use the Apple II and bring in the revenue.
I am a fan of Steve Jobs for marketing and his CEO abilities. If it were not for Steve Jobs the Mac would not still be here. Actually Apple finally killed the floppy drive and gave us USB. The original iMacs were so popular it finally got the peripheral makers on board which benefited the PC.
Steve also saved us somewhat from a more evil MS. When the iPhone came out WindowsCE finally died! Remember you could only buy something from the carrier store like $4 for a crappy .mid syntthasized ringtone etc? Windows improved and pricing became better for those stuck on the PC side. Google helped too with making Windows 10 and VS community edition free.
Yeah I would probably admit I would not want to work directly for him. I am a PC user in the camp of not hating Apple but acknowledge his move to perfection did help move the PC and mobile industry over and people love his products whether you do or not.
Long term it was healthy for computing ecosystem. Even Intel today is making each new i5/i7 use less and less power which really started from Jobs perfection in the days of the Ipad which Intel wants in. How is this a bad thing?
Re:Steve (Score:5, Informative)
The Apple ][ originally competed with the Commodore PET (and a number of other early personal computers). The Apple ][ had color and good sound support, while Commodore didn't have that until the Commodore 64, which was released in 1982. (The Apple ][ was released in 1977.) The Apple ][ also had a good, fast, inexpensive and reliable floppy drive while Commodore released a number of slow and expensive floppy drives.
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How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's?
Those are some very different machines. As someone who was *really* into Microcomputers in the 80's...
The TRS-80 was black-and-white, and its graphics were....kinda cruddy. The Z-80 that ran it was kind of weak too, but that didn't matter so much because of the previously mentioned issues. Much worse machine than an Apple II, but they were cheap and you could buy one at any Radio Shack.
The C64 (and the Atari 800 it was apeing) were later machines than the Apple II. They used the same 6502 that the Apple I
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emperor sans clothing (Score:3)
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Re:emperor sans clothing (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think it's fair to call Steve Jobs a fruit. His sexual preference should not be an issue.
Now, if you're referring to Apple customers... ..you still get points off for the homophobic slur, but gain points for accuracy.
It takes two... (Score:5, Insightful)
The best product is meaningless if you don't have someone like Jobs shoving it down people's throats to get them to buy. Same with Woz, if you don't have something really cool to sell, then no one would have listened to Steve for very long. Two sides of the same coin. I'm not an Apple or Jobs fan, but obviously Steve did a lot of things right for a long time.
I doubt Woz was very good at sales. I doubt Steve was very good at building computers. No product "sells itself", and anyone who really believes that is an idiot.
Re:It takes two... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Plenty of computer manufacturers manage to sell product without you ever hearing the names of any of their marketing workers. Apple's janitors were also essential to their success as a company, but unless we start giving everyone praise, it's not fair to give any to someone like Jobs. It's the engineers who made the product, everyone else was auxiliary.
The question isn't who played an essential role because pretty much everyone in the company played an essential role, but if you re-role the hiring dice and end up with another janitor they probably would have been just as successful. In most companies this holds true for most of the marketing and engineering staff, they've great at their jobs but they're far from the only people who could be great at their jobs.
As for Apple I think Jobs and Wozniak were both exceptional. Replace Jobs and the Apple I might
Re: It takes two... (Score:2)
So how are Dell, HP, Gateway,Lenovo or the other major PC manufacturers doing these days? How are the major cell phone manufacturers doing these days?
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I love the AAPL origin story. It's like a cross between the Fantastic Four and the Odd Couple.
Re:It takes two... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the cult of personality around Jobs, it stands to reason that his actual contributions need to be put into perspective. Nobody is denying that he was a savvy businessman, or at least a savvy product marketer. Some people want to believe he was a messiah of sorts, others a pariah. But the actual workers who made Job's vision a reality tend to be completely overlooked in this fight, and it's high time their contributions were given their due share (and not just by nerds who already respect them).
Re:It takes two... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It takes two... (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't help that Jobs leveraged people like Woz, who's very candid and even humble, while being a total arrogant prick himself, even as the media try to portray him as an aspirational model.
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No. That's the straw man being attacked by those huffing the Hatorade bong. Jobs never claimed to have been a tech inventor, sorry.
Re: It takes two... (Score:3)
Fully agree.
The aspirational model is part and parcel of the Jobs myth. I am an Apple person I guess but that guy was a dick in many ways. The success he achieved is due to his ability to captivate users and consumers alike with notions of technological grandiosity. Often the peoe behind him could deliver on these whack ads promises. With the likes of people like Woz behind you, how could you fail?
When the guy at the top is ousted and no one has any goddamn clue what people want before they know they want
I think geeks miss the point (Score:3)
becuase they're geeks and (understandably, self-servingly) want to point how how central and important geeks are to, say, computing and technology hardware and software development, design, and production.
But it is one of the rarest geniuses on earth to be able to conduct a group of people to produce to their maximum potential, to be able to somehow lead talent to actually produce what the talent is capable of as a group and to do things that everyone else wants to do, but everyone else also falls short of
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You forget the job of asshole with a vision. It's important sometimes to have a leader that has a vision there to push and make decisions. It may even help in this case if Jobs wasn't tech savvy. He represented the non tech people. He wanted his stuff to work. When you let techies build things you get Linux which is great. But I'm not installing it for my 70 year old mother. Meanwhile she can pick up an iPhone and with little help be off and running. I never need to go over and clean 71 toolbars out of Saf
Re:It takes two... (Score:5, Interesting)
My older sister was in her late 60s and not at all tech savvy when she first encountered Linux. It only took her five minutes with a live version of Ubuntu to decide that it was what she wanted. I helped her install it, dual boot with Windows, and with access to her Windows partition so that she could get at much-needed files. It's been years since she's needed to boot Windows, and after the first few weeks of getting used to Linux, her tech-support questions to me dropped to less than 5% of what they were under Windows and have stayed that way ever since. (Most of her questions I can solve in just a few minutes and the rest go to the Ubuntu forum.) You don't need to be a computer geek or a Unix guru to run Linux; you just need to select a distro that's designed for average people, such as Ubuntu.
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When you let techies build things you get Linux which is great.
I used to believe this too, but then look what happened when someone let a bunch of techies made a desktop environment, and they came up with Gnome 3.
Some techies working without some asshole non-technical manager come up with great stuff like the Linux kernel, DD-WRT, PostgreSQL, etc. But sometimes they come up with shit.
But I'm not installing it for my 70 year old mother.
Try installing Linux Mint for her and see if she has any problems with
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No, that's not what happened at all, with either of them.
KDE4 was because the KDE codebase was spaghetti code, and they had a lot of ideas they wanted to pursue and they wanted a better architecture to do it with, because they were spending too much time dealing with spaghetti-code bugs, so instead of refactoring piece by piece they decided that since they were switching to the Qt4 libraries anyway, they might as well just start all over. The end result has actually been really good for the most part, it j
Re:It takes two... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes people forget that Linux has their own "asshole with a vision" as well. In fact, I'd say Linux actually had two. Both of those individuals had a very strong presence (along with contentious personalities) and helped to shape Linux into what it is today during it's formative years, and not only from a technological standpoint.
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As long as she's holding it right and only wants to do the things that AAPL allows.
true. A great company is more than a product (Score:2)
This is so true. I'm really good at a few things and pretty bad at a lot of things. In 20 years, I've developed two pretty impressive products, products that were a generation ahead of all competitors. I sure wish I had someone like Steve Jobs turning my good products into great companies!
I barely made a living from my products because I suck at marketing and I'm not very good at running a company. I sure wish I had someone with marketing and business talent to turn my products, like Clonebox, into highl
Thank you. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am so sick of the cult of authority worship.
It's part of the worship of the wealthy.
It's part of the denigration of work, as the executives go around saying that engineers are and should be interchangable, we're fry cooks, and working us to death is slightly more efficient than allowing us lives. And so we should all be worked to death.
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Me too.
ALL GLORY TO THE WOZ!
Re:Thank you. (Score:5, Insightful)
This a very worthy topic of conversation on Labor Day. I don't know if you're in the US, but "denigration of work" is what's been for dinner for at least the past 35 years.
It's worth quoting Abraham Lincoln here (yes, this is a real Lincoln quote):
http://www.brainyquote.com/quo... [brainyquote.com]
Good quote (Score:3)
He doesn't SOUND like a Republican
I have always felt ill (Score:5, Insightful)
because of the media's worship of Jobs. What's he anyways? An executive? The man famous for bullshit? "Reality distortion field"
For bad decisions like making the first macs impossible to expand?
For bad decisions like not making products where you can change a battery that's lost half it's capacity in six months?
Don't you feel a bit cheated?
Re:I have always felt ill (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "bad" decision make sense if you think of it in the context of planned obsolescence. Jobs wanted you to keep buying new toys as he made more money that way. Jobs had one objective in life; make money for Steve Jobs. He was an excellent flimflam man and many people fell for his "reality distortion field".
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I never got the reality distortion field bit. Even people that prefer windows or FOSS usually at least give Jobs a "brilliant salesman" title. His keynotes were good but that was mainly IMO because the products generally were somewhat interesting (it helps they only release a few of them, a couple times a year and they always go upmarket so they are generally novel, or at least close to cutting edge). Other than that I kind of tuned him out, like I do when an MS exec flogs their latest stuff: while they spe
Did it really make Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
So Jobs role was to judge that Apple had enough of a monopoly on design to make more money by screwing the customer and throwing away the downscale/rational part of the market.
Make products that deliberately wear out, make products that can not keep pace and must be replaced. That was his contribution.
No one can prove that Apple wouldn't have been just as successful or more successful if it didn't try to screw its consumers that way.
But I must admit that by screwing the proles they gave themselves some ca
Who thought Jobs *was* involved? (Score:2)
Who ever thought that Jobs was ever involved technically in in low levels of early Apple design, especially in things like the AppleII hardware? I sure didn't. I don't see why that needed clarifying...
If anything, the only open question would be is if Jobs had any role in the case design of the Apple I or II, though they weren't so fabulous that credit would really matter...
I've always thought credit for the original Apple systems was fairly placed between Woz doing amazing hardware work and Jobs drumming
Been saying this for YEARS now... apk (Score:3, Funny)
Mr. Wozniak, like most real doers got wrongfully overshadowed by a BIG TALKING BLOWHARD BULLSHITTER named Steve Jobs.
* I do NOT like "speaking ill of the dead" but it's only FACT... my fellow polish descended U.S. Citizen got screwed for a big mouth bullshit artist - a fucking LEECH who hung onto Mr. Wozniak's coattails since he lacked what it REALLY took (technical know-how) since ANY damn fool can do P.R. work!
APK
P.S.=> It's always that way - & it ALWAYS makes me laugh when I see things like "The 'great inventor' Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that... apk
When did Jobs claim to be the tech engineer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote is addressing a wee bit of a straw man. Still, it's a good drop of blood in the water for the Jobs haters to turn out.
Which was no doubt the idea behind posting it in the first place.
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So that we can be forced to write self-criticisms or sent to re-education farms?
This is not news (Score:2)
..to those who understand technology companies
This might be a surprise to members of the general public who assume everybody in a tech company is an engineer
They were both exceptional (Score:3, Informative)
This is hardly news for anyone, but reminded me of an anecdote from when both Steves were in their early twenties that summarizes the dynamic between them nicely:
When Steve Jobs worked at Atari, the company was working on creating the arcade game Breakout, which required 80 Integrated Circuits (ICs). The less ICs there were, the cheaper the games would be to produce, so Nolan Bushnell (Atari's president) offered $100 for every IC that could be knocked out of the design. Jobs brought Woz the challenge, and over four days and nights at Atari they put together a design that only required 30 ICs. Bushnell gave Jobs his $5000 bonus, which Jobs "split" with Wozniak by telling him it was a $700 bonus, giving him "half," or $350.
They were both exceptional. Woz an exceptional engineer, Jobs an exceptional sleazebag.
Someone has to sell what you make though (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers.
No doubt true. But if were not for Steve Jobs, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Woz probably wouldn't be uncountably rich, and no-one would have heard of the Apple I and Apple II (they probably wouldn't have even been called that).
Why do tech people consistently dismiss the contribution of people who actually market what they make?
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What the other guy does is always easy. That is why as an engineer you get a long list of huge change requests without anyone wanting to nail down a #1 item because "all should be pretty straight forward so should make it into next months release". Or sales guys who's talent is flapping their mouths get no credit by engineers who can barely mumble their way through small talk and often not even that in the common language. Or the guy that dumps his life savings into the company and "picks the winner" big de
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CEOs get to make critical decisions, but only the luckiest CEOs are able to be successful making them all on their own. The rest (wisely) rely on an army of advisors and specialists who make the decisions a lot simpler.
There's no way that Steve Jobs or Jack Welch or Elon Musk or any of the lauded Smartest Guys In The Room have the expertise to calculate the tax implications of where they locate a factory or some other critical but important detail.
The other thing is why are there so many critical decisions
Jobs? Nope (Score:2)
Back in the day his name was pronounced "J-oh-bzzz". But that's neither here nor there. Was he a techie? Not really But what he should be credited with is his marketing prowess. He was a marketing genius. Very few could even come close to his brilliance in that respect.
there is no genius here (Score:5, Insightful)
The vacuum of consumer demand for computers was created and Steve Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
He's no more special than any other lottery winner.
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With so many losers it has to take some kind of genius, however tri
Re:Been saying this for YEARS now... apk (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that
au contraire mon ami... He invented a style that makes billions. Do not be so hasty in judgement.
Style... of buying a products that need (Score:2)
external batteries strapped to them. It's the "I made an incompetent decision buying an overpriced phone/computer spiked with Jobs' incompetent ideas, and I'm too egotistical to admit it," style.
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Au contraire, mon cher, he did not invent a style, if at all his designers invented it for him. Big difference.
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By your logic, the US Patent Office should get the credit for Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
On this Labor Day, you should know better than most that labor precedes capital.
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Did Woz design the Apple II without any involvement from Jobs? Of course. But Jobs actually went out and sold the thing, and he made both of them rich. True, it's hilarious the way the media portrays Jobs as some sort of computer design demigod, but the actual role he played wasn't zero.
Re:Been saying this for YEARS now... apk (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. I did the engineering brain work to design the Apple ][ but Jobs productized it and sold it. His productization, like a plastic housing, was very important to the usability of that product. He did excellent marketing of it. Even though it wasn't his conception, it was his only major business success at Apple until his return. The monies it earned allowed Jobs to create the Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh and NeXT cube. I think the marketing and execution errors of those products were largely due to Jobs wanting to make himself a leader and often rushing products out too fast with poor marketing judgements, despite the fact that he spokes as the marketing genius. When he returned he took time and didn't share the iPhone with Bill Gates in advance. He got the product done the right way and it was very good because it was for himself too, not outsiders, a market that would make him money. It had to be good enough for him to use.
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Jobs said, in a lecture at Stanford, that his exposure to typography in college was the reason beautiful variable width fonts existed in Apple's OS and later, all computers due to copying by other OS vendors. I bet Woz had little to do with the UI of the Mac since he was mostly a hardware guy. And Macs have the best UI (except Yosemite, which is quite meh) thanks to Jobs... even Microsoft can't compete in that area.
If Jobs did nothing, how come there hasn't been a decent new product from Apple since his pas
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I am sure Woz has already been compensated quite well for his contributions. He provided the engineering and Jobs made sure more than 10 people knew it existed. I think the collaboration worked out just fine for both of them.
Re:Oh sure (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, we knew Jobs had an over-inflated ego. That came out long before his death.
Re:Oh sure (Score:5, Informative)
Now this all comes out after his death..Sounds like an over inflated ego to me
That thought crossed my mind as well. Since Jobs ain't there to contradict him....
Speaking as a former Apple ][ dev, this was all common knowledge. Jobs was the salesman, Woz was the engineer. That said, sales was certainly a very important and critical role. Both Steves were absolutely essential to Apple's success. Jobs got an upgrade in our view post-Mac due to his look-and-feel design work, but still he was never thought of as a hands on tech person.
Woz is the hero of the Apple story to engineers, Jobs is the hero to wall street. The mainstream news and the public at large merely lean towards the wall street perspective.
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From the stupid fawning, worshipful articles I've read over the years equating Apple with Jobs, I'd say the media didn't know. They equate "bullshit artist and slave driver" with "progress!"
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No, because people think it was Bill Gates who single handed invented desktop computing and the software industry [harvard.edu]. I read it on a web site so it must be true.
I facepalmed because you're right. (Score:2)
Except that the next thing is that due to google, all human jobs will be replaced by robots who can talk and drive cars and no one will have any privacy as the human race is phased out.
So.. maybe it will say that Google invented the new people and there used to be a disgusting version 1.0 made of putrid juices.
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Invented the GUI? INVENTED THE GUI!??? (Score:2)
There aren't words strong enough for you.
Licensed the GUI from Xerox, invented by people like Alan Kay.
Re:stave jobs sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
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Avie Tevanian was one of the more important software engineers at NeXT, but he wasn't the only one. He wasn't one of the NeXT founders, he was hired after NeXT was started.
Re:stave jobs sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple would have collapsed even if Jobs stuck around. It was a company that grew too big, too fast. It was a feeding ground for people with grand ideas and even more grandiose egos. Like many of it's contemporaries, it was doomed to fall.
Jobs' return was a different story, but a lot can still be attributed to luck. To Jobs credit, he was a more mature businessman and he reentered at a time when Apple realized that it had to be more humble. He probably would have saved the company regardless of what happened. Yet there was a lot of luck. Things like the iPod were initially directed at Apple's existing customers. The growth that it triggered and the products that it enabled were far from a bygone conclusion.
Re: (Score:3)
As mentioned, NeXT was not a fork of Mac OS. The other choice at the time was Beos as the replacement for OS9 which would have made an interesting parallel future if it happened.
I'm old enough that I think of Jobs as the guy who almost killed Apple. I can still hear the echo of him saying "Apple II forever" as he milked it to death in favour of the stripped down Lisa. It was hard to sell a 32 bit computer with a graphical UI and only 128 KBs of memory.
Lisa was usable ... (Score:5, Informative)
What killed Lisa more than anything else was the $10K price tag. I got to use one a bit and it was quite useable, at least to an Apple ][ and very early Mac user.
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Of course I know who Weird Al is; I remember when "Even Worse" was brand new, but I never wasted time watching infomercials. If I stayed up late, I was either watching Johnny Carson or doing something on my computer.
Yes, Jobs was a salesdrone, but he helmed the company when it made the iPod and the iPhone, two phenomenally successful products. That's what he's going to be remembered for. Those products will be in museums (if they aren't already). Ronco products will not. Unfortunately, the nature of ou
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You know who else knows how to "make them want something"? Drug dealers and prostitutes.
Happy Labor Day.
"Drug dealers and prostitutes" (Score:2)
Damn it, now I want to take Jobs' side.
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ANY fool can be a "marketing genius", doesn't take brains.
So. You're a millionaire, are you? Thought not.
Re:This now removes all doubt... (Score:5, Informative)
NeXT was a flop. They couldn't sell anything. It was vastly overpriced and hardly world class. The only reason that Jobs ended up back at Apple was because the OS that Apple was using at the time was hopelessly outdated and unstable and Scully was running the company into the ground. Obviously they couldn't use Windows so they needed something and the UNIX based system that NeXT was using fit the bill.
Mind you, the first few iterations of OSX were pretty bad as well. Slow, buggy and crash prone but it was a start. Apple stuck with it and got it right. I'll give Jobs credit for switching to Intel based processors. That was probably the smartest thing he did. And I'll give him credit for the whole "vertical stack" thing where Apple builds the hardware and designs the software. That was smart.
But Woz was the hands on guy. He was the guy that got it done and I don't think he gets enough credit for the overall success of the company. I'm not anti Apple or anything. I like their products. I just tend to think that Jobs gets more credit than he deserves.